NPR health correspondent Allison Aubrey traces how a reporting assignment at the Potocsnak Longevity Center at Northwestern University led to an unexpected personal reckoning. While undergoing tests measuring biological age through epigenetic clocks and DNA methylation, she arrived at a realization that she had been running too fast and needed to stop. That moment became the catalyst for what she calls a curiosity tour, a series of 150 interviews with ordinary women navigating midlife with intention. The conversation covers how she frames this period as the “third turn,” a horse-racing metaphor anchored in her grandfather’s observation that something unexpected happens when a competitor can see the home stretch. She distinguishes this from conventional ideas about retirement, replacing the script of “learn, earn, retire” with “learn, earn, return,” a return to playfulness, purpose, and the skills built over a lifetime.
The women Aubrey profiles illustrate what that return can look like. A former Smithsonian magazine editor who lived in terror of public speaking took her first improv class at 59, now performs regularly, and used what researchers describe as a form of exposure therapy to fully transform how she occupies a room. A classically trained violinist who left the instrument behind discovered fiddling festivals and rediscovered music as play rather than performance. A Filipino restaurant owner who lost her acclaimed Washington, D.C. restaurant during the pandemic found that the forced loss accelerated her path to self-examination. The conversation also takes up audience questions on whether the framework applies to men, how people navigate reinvention under financial or health constraints, and what purpose looks like alongside ongoing caregiving obligations. Aubrey closes by describing how writing the book reconnected her to a version of herself she had left behind.
Lecturer bio:
Allison Aubrey is an award-winning science and health correspondent for NPR News and a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Her stories can be heard on Morning Edition and All Things ConsidÂered. She is the creator of the How to Thrive as You Age project. Aubrey is the winner of two James Beard broadcast awards, a National Press Club award for consumer reporting, and a New York Press Club award for excellence in journalism. She is the mother of three children, including two sons who are entering their twenties and a daughter who is in high school.
