Lifelong Learning, and the Grandmother of Juneteenth

1. Please join us in 2080 for the PhD Ceremony.

We love the concept of lifelong learning, but we must admit that Ginger Hislop has stretched the definition of lifelong learner beyond our wildest expectations. Hislop started at Stanford in 1936, earning her bachelor's degree in 1940. She planned to start a master’s degree in education program right after graduation but WWII intervened, forcing her and her new husband to change plans.

Though Hislop postponed her education plans, she never gave up on the hopes of getting her degree from Stanford. And earlier this week, at the age of 105, she walked across the stage at Stanford, having finally earned her master’s degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

The degree is a capstone on a life dedicated to education and learning. Hislop spent much of her life supporting the education system, holding roles as a long-serving member of the Yakima School Board of Directors; becoming a founding member of the board of directors for Yakima Community College, and helping to start Heritage University in Toppenish, Washington, where she served on the board for 20 years.

2. 84 years is nothing. It look Opal Lee 85 to get her house back.

Today is Juneteenth, the national holiday marking the day that the last slaves in Galveston, Texas were finally notified of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the victory of the North in the Civil War. Sometimes known as America’s Second Independence Day, Juneteenth has been long celebrated within the Black community but only became an official federal holiday in 2021.

The effort to designate Juneteenth a federal holiday had many important proponents but perhaps chief among them has been Opal Lee, a retired Fort Worth area schoolteacher who is known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth”. Lee’s story is one of the great American second acts. After retiring from teaching in 1976, Lee threw herself into community activities, including the local Juneteenth celebration, and eventually became an advocate to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. She organized annual walks of 2.5 miles, representing the 2.5 years that it took for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas. In 2016, at the age of 89, Lee walked from Fort Worth to Washington DC to highlight the prospects of the Juneteenth holiday. And at the age of 94, she was a guest at the White House signing ceremony, receiving the first signature pen from President Joe Biden.

This year’s celebration is additionally special for Lee because it marks the 85th anniversary of the day a mob in Fort Worth, enraged by the fact that a Black family had moved into the neighborhood, attacked and vandalized the Lee house, forcing the family to flee. The family was unable to return, at least until this week, when Lee was presented with the key to her new home, built on the land that the family had been driven from eight and a half decades ago.

3. I hold regular Don't Die dinners too.

Pretty much every night, when I hope that my cooking doesn’t sicken anyone. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. The "Don’t Die" dinners in the news are regular meals hosted by tech entrepreneur and fountain of youth guru Bryan Johnson.

If you’re not familiar with Johnson, he is a tech investor and longevity enthusiast who has gained fame for his “blueprint protocol:” a plan to arrest and perhaps even reverse aging. His self-treatment, also marketed to the world under the blueprint protocol brand, involves an extraordinary number of daily supplements, 100 in all, fasting after 11 A.M., fully body MRIs, microneedling, and blood plasma transfusions. It sounds rather wretched to us, but this week Johnson claims to have reached a new personal best of .64 “pace of ageing” and now celebrates his birthday every 19 months. It does make it very hard to remember when to send gifts, but we suppose it has its own rewards.

Johnson also holds regular “Don’t Die” dinners to explore with his guests questions like “if you had access to an algorithm that can give you the best physical, mental, and spiritual health of your life, but in exchange for access to the algorithm, you would have to go to bed when it said, and you would exercise in the way it said, would you say yes or would you say no?” We would say no, mostly because we don’t trust algorithms, but we weren’t invited to dinner anyway. But this week, three of the Kardashians and podcast superstar Andrew Huberman were, which has created a minor stir in social media and the press who care about these things.