At 101, she still edits copy every Wednesday: here’s her routine

For most working professionals, retirement comes decades before 100. Not for Eileen Lavine. At 101 and a half, she still logs into a weekly virtual meeting for her role as senior editor at Moment, a magazine about Jewish life partly founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. She has copy edited its content since 2008 and shows no sign of stepping back.

Her career began young. Lavine, a native New Yorker, left home for the University of Wisconsin at just 16, where she reported for the Daily Cardinal and became the first woman to serve a full term as its editor. She went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism, then worked across newspapers in Massachusetts, The New York Times, public relations, radio scriptwriting, and an editorial post at Better Times.

In 1962, noticing friends kept turning to her for edits, Lavine and seven others each put in $50 to start Information Services, a company offering writing and editing services to nonprofits that could not afford dedicated staff, such as pathology societies, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Education. Though the company has since shut down, Lavine’s editing work never stopped.

Lavine told TODAY.com she does not credit physical fitness for her longevity. She uses a walker, does not swim, and takes only occasional short walks. ‘I’m not an athlete,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it up here.’ She keeps her mind active through a strict daily routine: breakfast, then The New York Times and The Washington Post, followed by the New Yorker’s crossword, Substack newsletters, and reads from ProPublica, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Hill.

Staying social is central to her routine too. Lavine plays bridge with neighbors in her apartment, a tradition she continued after her husband Richard’s death in 2014, and plays poker every Thursday night. She ends most evenings with the gameshows ’25 Words or Less’ and ‘Jeopardy!’, sometimes followed by a British spy thriller with her visiting children, and keeps in touch with others by email.

Her mother’s lesson to ‘look on the best side of things all the time and to really feel that you’re making a contribution’ has stayed with Lavine throughout her life, something she reflected on in her 2022 memoir, ‘A Medley of Extemporanea,’ written when she was 97. Its epilogue reads: ‘It’s been amazing to look back on it all.’

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by Nenad Stojkovic (representative image)