I'm still figuring out the structure of the book, but I know what I want its message to be. Here's a draft of the new Introduction:

The demographic good fortune of the baby boom generation has its dark side. Privileged and powerful, Americans came of age in an era of youth movements (never trust anyone over 30!) and we’ve worshipped at the shrine ever since.

That’s the subtitle of a Newsweek article by contributing editor Eliot Cose, which cites bleak employment statistics for workers over 55, a jump in age-discrimination complaints, and a recent Supreme Court ruling that weakens the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Betty Soskin and I have been in touch, and she pointed me to this video about her life and work as an outreach specialist  and interpreter at Rosie the Riveter WWII/ Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, CA. Her long history in the area makes her an invaluable asset, not least because, as she puts it, “I’m at an age where I know how all the stories turned out.”

Wincingly titled “The Loin in Winter,” a story on the front page of the New York Times describes Hugh Hefner’s work-, travel-, and fun-filled life.  Granted, not too many octogenarians would have a slew of 20-somethings eager to move in, as did Hef after breaking up with his “No. 1 girlfriend” last fall.  (He picked three blondes; don’t miss the photo.)

Judith Warner’s “I Feel It Coming Together” post on her "Domestic Disturbances" blog, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times, bemoans the fact that it’s all downhill after age 44. “I now see the passage of time more as a kind of bell curve,” she writes. “Years of ascension, soaring anticipation, followed by a plateau — which is not so bad, really — and then, no way to sugar coat this: a rather precipitous decline.” So long forever to “excitement, discovery, intensity.”  

Oh please.

I’ve blogged several times about “U-shaped happiness curve” studies  that show Americans to be most content at the beginning and end of their lives. Another one, the “August National Well-Being Index,” was released by Gallup on September 10th.  (Great news: Americans’ grip on their flotation cushions has relaxed by .07% since January!)

The poster child of this story on CNN.com today is Jack Borden, a 101-year-old attorney who practices fulltime in Weatherford, Texas. Retirement is the last thing on his mind. “I have to use a walker because of old age, so there's not much else I could do except sit in my house. Why do that when I can not only enjoy life, but help some people?" In Borden’s view, as in Bill and Ruth Stein’s,  limited mobility is a catalyst for staying on the job rather than a reason to take a load off.

Yay for the Center for Retirement Research, which is doing its part to rectify the dearth of research on workers age 65 and up.  Dubbing their subjects “the elderly,” a paper by economists Steven Haider and David Loughran titled “Elderly Labor Supply: Work or Play?” looks at who in this group works, at what, and why they stop. Here are some of their findings, some predictable and some considerably less so:

I’m lucky to be working with writer-editor and extremely sharp friend Marisa Bowe, who co-edited a terrific book called Gig: Americans Talk About Their Job at the Turn of the Millennium. She’s been reviewing my interview transcripts, and pulled the following quote out of my talk with Eddie Lewis, who worked for forty-three years as a milkman before getting hired by the local funeral home. “How come you didn’t get a job with better hours?” I asked, after prying out of him the fact that he’d never liked the 2:30AM wake-up call. “I don’t know. I never thought of it,” Lewis replied.

Yesterday was the first day of my Visiting Fellowship at Yale Law School, where my colleagues are focused on the implications of new information technologies.   Like, say, Twitter. And sometimes the universe just hands you something, like this story about Twitter user Ivy Bean published by CNN on her 104th birthday.