70 over 70
5.0/5
Critic Rating
A show about how we make the most of the time we have left. Max Linsky talks to 70 remarkable people, all over the age of 70, not just about their past but their lives right now. These are conversations about the big questions we all ask ourselves, no matter how old we are. What does it mean to live well? What are we still searching for? And how do we learn to let go?
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Clementine Ford • Air Mail • Jun 5, 2021
"Linsky’s questions are shamelessly earnest, tending toward the abstract and existential rather than the careers and accomplishments of his guests. But this inevitably steers the discussions into unexpected territory, and somehow away from the sentimental, making for a sideways, and unsurprisingly unsappy, look at the lives of these legends and the lessons they’ve learned along the way."
Score: 4.8
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • May 26, 2021
" The podcast features Linsky taking his signature interview style — sneakily cutting, in the sense that it packages an aggressive interest in the existential within a patina of gentle, feel-good public-radio adjacence — and applying it to a demographic that is perhaps the very embodiment of the existential: people over the age of 70. I’m also, frankly, not quite sure how much existentialism I can take on a weekly basis, a reservation driven in part by some generational angst on my end: The world continues to burn, in part due to the choices made by the generation in question, and I can’t be certain I’ll be able to separate that feeling from listening to the show."
Score: 5
Margaret Sullivan • Washington Post • May 23, 2021
"Linsky is an engaging interviewer whose voice always seems to contain the hint of a smile. His skill is based on deep preparation, as I found out when he interviewed me for a Longform podcast in 2015 about the “agony and ecstasy,” as he put it, of being the New York Times public editor. Although the guests are a diverse lot — from Madeleine Albright to Raffi — some common themes have emerged: Almost everyone has talked about the importance of being fully present in the moment. They’ve also expressed little fear when Linsky asked them how they felt about dying."
Score: 5
Reggie Ugwu • New York Times • May 21, 2021
"Though the other interviews are less personal, most are cathartic in some way. Linsky, who has learned his lesson since the Loomis and Adler conversations, is a sensitive and relentlessly curious interlocutor. The show is earnest in its investigation of what he abashedly calls, in an introduction to the first episode, “meaning of life stuff.”…"
