NYTimes magazine article "Death of a Caveman / Who Lives Longest?"

To the editors,

The article "Death of a Caveman / Who Lives Longest?" claims that "life expectancy at birth in the United States is roughly 79 years, and it’s the same at age 25". This may mean either that people who reach the age of 25 live in average only to the same age as newborns do, a mathematical impossibility; or that 25-year-old Americans will reach an average age of 104, which is false. Unfortunately this error makes the whole argument of the article collapse, except for the quote “ ‘Life expectancy’ is this term that entered public lingo without public understanding of what it really means.”

Yours sincerely, Felipe Pait