“A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—as if there’s been some sort of error’ were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.” The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior on The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are. (I’m one of the few people who thinks I’m about three decades older than I am, and I have the lab work to prove it.)

+ A few years ago, my wife, Gina Pell wrote about something related to this sensation in an article that went globally viral. Meet the Perennials.