My new year’s resolution is to start integrating more personal reflections into the blog. No better place to begin than a BBC News story that came my way last week about a link between youthful looks and longer lives. Studies show younger-looking twins in both Denmark and the UK outliving their siblings. As ever, it’s a dance between genetics and environment. Worn faces probably reflect harder lives, and those subjects also had shorter telomeres (pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes from deteriorating).

Hats off to Susan Llewellyn. In a New York Times Letter to the Editor today, she called New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on his response (above) to reporters pressing him about a recent spate of offensive remarks. “It reads a lot like, ‘I am 67 years old and too old to change.’” Llewellyn commented.  “As someone who has two years on His Honor, I still hope never to use my age as an excuse for my attitudes!”

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.

When I began this project, “How old do you feel?” didn’t sound like a loaded question. Ann Shulgin, wife of pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, writes in TiKHAL that, “ You always feel like you’re thirty-three.” That seemed about right to me.