I’m deep into the book proposal, currently wrangling with the chapter on Identity (the fifth Terror of Aging on my list being “I’ll be invisible.")  Late life puts a different spin the link between work and identity, and I really liked Dave Davison’s take on things.  I interviewed the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist in his gracious living room not far from the Stanford University campus.

A few weeks ago Alison Linn interviewed me for an article called “When the golden years include a commute,” part of an MSNBC series called “Plan C: The new reality of retirement.” The story, which quotes AARP editor Jim Toedtman at length, describes a workforce that’s retiring later and contains many people in their 70s, 80s and beyond.

Recently, perhaps in guilty compensation for a vacation of utter sloth, I’ve been mulling over the notion of productivity. Bound up in the American veneration of the work ethic, it’s prime redress for that overarching fear in old age:  becoming a burden. In my interview criteria I define it as “doing or making something on a regular schedule,” laying bare my assumption that most people (or at least most of my readers) aspire to lifelong productivity and that this is a good thing.  

back August 10th

That’s how you spell “aging” in the UK, and that’s Guardian columnist Zoe Williams’s take on this week’s US Census Bureau report on the unprecedented aging of the world population. Calling out an alarmist press for presenting this demographic shift as either a crisis or a burden, she exposes the standard fallacies, pointing out that people will continue to work well past traditional retirement ages and be healthy enough to do so.

from Jim Toedtman, Editor of the AARP Bulletin

"If you're seeking the diet, the pills and the shortcuts to the fountain of youth, you'll be disappointed. Instead, Staying Vertical presents the combined wisdom of a savvy, enlightened  collection of people who once past their 80s chose to remain engaged, active, productive and positive, at home and at work. Their numbers are growing, and thanks to Ashton Applewhite, a shrewd chronicler and story-teller, we are inspired by their lessons."

You heard it here first — unless you read Generations Beat Online,  a newsletter  edited by longtime age beat journalist Paul Kleyman. He coined the phrase to describe “the sociological climate change we call the longevity revolution,” and I think it’s genius.  

Marci Alboher, an expert on workplace trends and writer of the excellent Working the New Economy blog, interviewed me last week for a piece called Will you work when you're eighty?

Born in Romania in 1916, Fanita English was raised in Istanbul, where the teachers in her British school pitied their small charges “for the misfortune of not being born British. That very strong sense of being condescended to stayed with me,” she recalled with a smile. A fiercely independent streak was reinforced by the fact that her father was supporting two sisters whose dowries had been spent by their husbands, as well as his widowed sister and her three children. “Do not expect a dowry like all these other Balkan girls,” he told her.

I spent most of last week in Mexico City, luxuriating in Pedro Meyer and Nadia Baram’s hospitality and listening to my partner, Bob Stein, speechify about the networked book.  He founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, upon one of whose experiments this blog was originally modeled, and defines "book" as the thing we use to move big ideas around.