This Associated Press article brought to my attention by geriatrician Hilary Siebens chirps, “It turns out everything doesn't go downhill as we age — the golden years really are golden.” A three-decade study of 28,000 people conducted by Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist, showed older Americans to be the happiest at every stage.

Following up on an earlier post about the first-ever recorded drop in the lifespan of American women, I came across this piece by TechNewsWorld columnist Sonia Arrison. It’s hardly suprising that the biotech industry views this dismal demographic shift as just another market opportunity. But I was so horrified by the columnist’s position that I had to comment:

Some days, everything just seems to line up. Yesterday I found out I’d been accepted into the Age Boom Academy, a seminar for journalists run by the International Longevity Institute, so my boyfriend and I went out for a celebratory drink. On a whim we ducked down a set of stairs on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, below a red neon sign that said Fedora’s. We found ourselves in a cozy, low-ceilinged room and ordered martinis at the bar. When I commented on baby pictures taped to the cash register, the bartender informed me that they were of the proprietor’s great-grandson.

I’ve been chewing over lots of longevity-related statistics lately. Almost all chart seemingly inexorable progress: Americans have gained 30 additional years of life in the 20th century; 17% percent of that increase is above the age of 65; the old old (aged 85+) make up the fastest growing subset of that group.

So two groundbreaking studies reported earlier this week and headlining this Sunday’s New York Times’ Week in Review

After arthritis forced her to give up embroidery in her 70’s, the renowned American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses (aka “Grandma Moses”) took up painting. She lived to be 101. Coincidence? Not if Gene Cohen, the eminent evangelist of good news about the aging brain, is right.

The Knight Seminar ended almost a week ago, but I’m just beginning to digest all the information that came at me from experts in fields ranging from demography to neuroscience to end-of-life care. Here are eight quotes that struck me as particularly relevant to this project:

1. “We have gained on average 10 biological years of life since our grandparents’ era.” — Abigail Trafford, Washington Post health editor

Coincidence, I swear: I arrived last night at the University of Maryland to attend a Knight Foundation seminar titled “Longevity: America Ages.” And as I settled into my colossal bed at the Marriott, my New Yorker magazine opened to an article about “the coming boomer longevity competition.”

Renowned industrial designer Eva Zeisel is still at it at 101, despite macular degeneration that means she can only see bright objects, and only indistinctly. That hasn’t dimmed her sense of style: when I ask permission to take a photograph, she instructs me to move a pot of pink impatiens closer to pep up the background.

Via the Ageism blog of the International Longevity Center, I just found out about a study debunking the myth that people grow more conservative with age. In fact, sociologists from the University of Vermont and Penn State found that the opinions of Americans veer increasingly leftward.

Several people whose opinions I respect have mentioned Marc Freedman and his organization, Civic Ventures, so I found myself listening to an interview with Freedman on AARP’s Prime Time Radio. Talking about his new book (Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life), Freedman declares the nature of what it means to grow older in America to be “under radical revision. For a long time the dream in this country was liberation from labor. Now it’s becoming a dream around the freedom to work.” [emphasis his]