A Better Way to Grow Old

Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, was raised mainly by her grandparents. But she says that her family didn’t have a plan to take care of them, and after witnessing her grandfather miserable in a nursing home she decided to spend her career working to improve home care for the elderly. A labor organizer, recipient of the Macarthur Fellowship, and the author the new book “The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America,” Poo spoke with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden about changing the way we approach the part of life nobody wants to talk about.