That was the title of a really excellent piece in the Sunday New York Times the week that Ringo Starr celebrated turning 70 on stage at Radio City (and that gerontologist Robert Butler died) . Mercifully, the point of the article was that boomers need not aspire to rocking and rolling their way though old age — “a stereotype almost as enduring as ageism itself.”

From health to home ownership, here’s a one-page statistical snapshot of what it’s like to be an American in your 70’s. Overall, a far brighter picture than a few decades ago, according to Dr. Marie Butler, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging.

I took an instant liking to Claudia Fine, the Executive Vice President of SeniorBridge, a national organization that provides health and care management. We met in her midtown office, following up on a connection I’d made through a journalism seminar. She was warm, candid, and impatient with institutional dumbness.

At an afternoon session of this year’s Age Boom Academy for journalists there was a critical mass of geriatricians at the table: Robert Butler and Harrison Bloom, both of the International Longevity Institute (which co-sponsors the Academy along with the New York Times), and Rosanne Leipzig of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.  I took advantage of this to pop a question I’d written about a few weeks earlier: what makes geriatrics so satisfying?

This weekend I presented my work for the first time, at the annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of social scientists and practitioners whose work I greatly respect. The title of the talk was “The Value of Work in Late Life,” but I pulled a slight bait-and-switch, because it turns out that this project isn’t about work any more. It's about ageism, starting with our own internalized biases.  Here’s the ten-minute talk I gave:

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.

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:

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.

I’ve been working on the Introduction for the book proposal, and am delighted by the fact that a number of ideas fell nicely into place. One of them was the framing of three central paradoxes of aging well.  The first I knew intuitively.  The third one was a complete surprise when I encountered it through my reading; then (duh!) I realized that it mirrored my own experience. The second one I only figured out a few weeks ago, while trying to synthesize research findings.

Current research into the relation between work and longevity describes an intricate web. “A constellation of work-related factors — whether you're employed, how secure you are in your job, how much you enjoy your work — may influence both your day-to-day health and how long you live,” writes Katherine Hobson in Newsday.