Love the story Judy Solerno tells at the start of this podcast. The story is about how John Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, mapped out cases of Cholera in London in the year 1854. He was able to identify a concentration of cases near a neighborhood water pump. Simply removing the handle from the pump halted the outbreak. This is one of the earliest recorded uses of maps for public health purposes.

Our guests today, Judy Salerno (President Emeritus of the New York Academy of Medicine) and Lindsay Goldman (CEO of Grantmakers in Aging) have done some wonderful work creating detailed, in-depth, interactive maps of aging in New York City. Go to IMAGENNYC and try it yourself.

Today we talk about:

• How the whole country became familiar with these sort of maps during Covid

• The case for using these maps for health needs of older adults, outside of the use cases in infections like Cholera and Covid

• Our "favorite" density maps of resources, services, and amenities, including: benches, crosswalks, tree canopy, heat vulnerability, among others.

• Use cases for these maps in public health and planning, grantmaking/philanthropy, and politics/policy advocacy.

• Judy's work creating similar maps for Sao Paulo Brazil (will add link here when website is up).

• How others can replicate this process in their home cities or counties

And I get to sing Tapestry, by Carol King, which Judy chose in honor of two recently deceased giants of feminism, Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. My wife Cindy plays piano on the audio only podcast.

-Alex Smith