I’ve just received a fellowship from the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism to attend their April seminar: "Longevity: America Ages". It’s designed to bring journalists of all stripes up to speed about “trends in aging, the coming retirement tsunami, health issues and more,” and introduce us to “experts from top research institutions, government, business and the media.” Not to mention five nights at the Marriott Inn and Conference Center in College Park, Maryland! I’m delighted.

Did you know that Jim Crow laws remained in effect for the better part of a century? Enacted in the wake of the Civil War to establish “separate but equal” status for black Americans, they were enforced in southern states between 1876 and 1965. Jim Crow laws were a major catalyst for the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities to escape segregation, among them Billy Kyle’s parents, who moved to Detroit from Missouri and Arkansas, respectively.

Looking forward to cashing that Social Security check? For many of the people I’ve interviewed it’s a primary source of income. In 1935, just as they were beginning to enter the labor force, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law as part of the New Deal. Although this universal retirement program had precedents in Europe and in a system of Civil war pensions, it generated plenty of controversy — and continues to.

Joshua Micah Marshall made news in the blogosphere today. The founder of the popular political blog Talking Points Memo, he won a George Polk Award for legal reporting on the firing of eight United States attorneys— reporting that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.” Talking Points Memo is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk, but to me that’s not the big news.

It’s been chastening and illuminating to see certain preconceived notions fall by the wayside as my research progresses. An early one was the assumption that good health was a precondition for an active old age. Although I expected to encounter the occasional, extraordinary geriatric Stephen Hawking, it seemed intuitively obvious. And certainly most of the people I’ve spoken with are exceptionally healthy, remaining physically mobile as well as mentally agile. Good luck, good genes.

But many also suffer from chronic or degenerative disease — and it doesn’t keep them from their work.

Last October I interviewed Cornelius Reid in his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, its cozy living room dominated by a grand piano. “So, you’re a voice teacher?” I asked.

“I just teach people what I know,” he responded, a little tartly. “I teach them how to make music.”

Every Valentine's Day Daniel Jones reaches for an uber-comment on the human condition for the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. (Full disclosure: this is the first part of the Sunday paper I turn to.) This year’s springboard was a new study of happiness patterns conducted by researchers from the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College.

This week I went to West Chester, Pennsylvania, to interview Eddie Lewis, aka the Bald-Headed Buzzard. Bald he is, and extremely fond of the nickname he gave himself early in his career as a milkman; his first rounds were in his father’s horse-drawn wagon.

I’ve been thinking about what turns activity into work in the eyes of others. A full-time, paying position with an eminently reputable outfit didn’t cut the mustard with Marcia Muth’s grandparents, who raised her in Fort Wayne Indiana, where Muth was born in 1919. They didn’t believe that women should attend college, but at nineteen she signed up for a night class. “My family was under the impression I was taking typing and shorthand and I was actually taking English literature,” Muth recounts.“I grew up reading Shakespeare, I liked classical music, I loved poetry. That was okay maybe on the side a little, but I was a disappointment to my family.”

That’s just one take-away quote from a terrific op-ed by Gloria Steinem ago about sexism in the ‘08 presidential race. (A correction notes that it misstates Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s position; presumably it will be amended to note that Kennedy today endorsed Obama — which probably won’t take Steinem by surprise.)