Turning invisibility inside out: Both the Washington Post and the New York Times took note this week of HBO’s “The Black List,” a series of conversations with “some of today’s most fascinating and influential African Americans.” Prominent among those  interviews is 77-year-old Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Other midlife women in the series include 44-year-old playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; 65-year old Faye Wattleton, the first African-American president of Planned Parenthood; and 41-year-old artist and curator Thelma Golden:

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem,
says [in the film]: “One of the funniest experiences I had when I began working in
the art world is that people always assumed I worked for Thelma Golden,
not that I was Thelma Golden. The kind of dismissal that comes from
just people’s sense that they don’t imagine you are who you are
actually has been one of the most powerful and liberating things for me
in my work.”

Looking out for land mines: Cindy McCain may feel, in this political season, like she’s always doing that. But this week, as she visits the Republic of Georgia, those mines are real:

It’s not every aspiring First Lady whose comfort zone is a war zone, but such is the case for Cindy McCain, who left today on a mission to Georgia to assess the civilian casualties of the Russian invasion.

McCain is traveling with the U.N.’s World Food Programme, whose work she monitored in Southeast Asia and Africa this spring and summer. McCain plans to meet with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and to visit wounded Georgian soldiers. She would also visit representatives of the HALO Trust, which works to remove land mines and on whose board she serves.

Now break it down by gender: Some possibly encouraging news from Wall Street Journal.com. While the jobs picture keeps getting bleaker for most, there appears to be a spike for the over-55 set, said outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas after looking at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. “Findings show that employment among those 55 and older grew by 3.7% to 26,631,000 in July 2008 from 25,686,000 in July 2007. The number of employed 20- to 44-year-olds declined by an average of 1.3% during the same period, Challenger reports.” Newsmix is still waiting to hear a) whether the growth was evenly distributed across genders and b) whether we’re talking real jobs, or grandmas and grandpas asking “You want fries with that?”

— Chris L.