If today's rancorous politics have left you begging for comic relief, why not drift back to those memorable times when things got really out of whack: the Nixon years. In his new novel, Watergate, Thomas Mallon demonstrates that the events of the early 1970s, when the bugging of the Democratic National Headquarters resulted in the biggest political scandal in our nation's history, are far enough behind us to laugh a little.

Mallon, who fictionalizes the story by probing the personal dynamics of Nixon's elite inner circle, is an old hand at examining historical events from distinctive viewpoints. His earlier novel Henry and Clara centered on the unlucky young couple who shared Lincoln's theater box on the night the president was assassinated. A later book, Dewey Defeats Truman, explored life in Owosso, Mich., the hometown of near-miss presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948. Perhaps it was inevitable that Mallon would get around to addressing Watergate, since his small brick home in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Foggy Bottom is across the street from the notorious Watergate Hotel.

The Purpose Prizes have been called "genius grants" for people over 60 and are awarded every year to social entrepreneurs who devote their encore careers to making the world a better place.

The application deadline for the 2012 prizes is March 30. Five winners will each receive $100,000 to continue their enterprises.

Wired Magazine co-founder and technology commentator Kevin Kelly has a message that some midlife career changers might not want to hear.

In the future, "Every career will be a technology career," Kelly shares in this YouTube video, part of a Kaplan University series with American thought leaders.

Airline miles are passé. Today, cold, hard cash is the No. 1 reward that consumers are demanding for their credit card spending, according to a new Capital One survey.

If you're not getting this perk, it's like you're missing out on free money.

In the wake of surprisingly robust job growth numbers, a corresponding drop in unemployment and a steadily improving stock market, more midlifers are starting to feel better about their future prospects.

A just-released Pew Research Center survey (pdf) shows that nearly half (roughly 47 percent) of people between 30 and 64 think the economy will be in better shape a year from now. That's significantly higher than the degree of economic optimism expressed by twentysomethings (41 percent) or people over 65 (40 percent).

Pop and country music legend Glen Campbell may have given his most breathtaking performance at Sunday night's 2012 Grammy Awards, when he joined Blake Shelton and The Band Perry onstage to perform his 1975 hit, "Rhinestone Cowboy." It wasn't Campbell's voice -- once a silky-smooth tenor, now rumbling in the lower registers -- that moved the audience to respond with a standing ovation.

Instead, it was the onetime chart-topping singer's bravery in soldiering in the face of early-stage Alzheimer's Disease. Campbell announced his diagnosis last year.

If certain novels just speak more clearly to baby boomers, it's often because of characters who have, shall we say, matured. Or the action unfolds in times that we all recall vividly -- even if, yikes, we're talking the '60s!

These five current works of fiction are generating especially strong buzz on the web and in the media.

Back in the day, The Who did a song, "Going Mobile," about the joys of jettisoning an old life and hitting the road as a carefree, "air-conditioned gypsy." Fiftysomething photographer Fran Reisner actually has had the nerve to give the mobile lifestyle a try.

Last year, the former Dallas resident, author of a 2011 book of whimsical canine portraiture, The Dogs of Central Park, decided to simplify her life after her daughter left for college. Reisner sold her home, got rid of most of her possessions, and took her business on the road. She brought along her two dogs and only what she could fit in a Winnebago.

It used to be easy to tell LinkedIn and Facebook apart: One was for business, and the other was for fun.

But as Facebook amassed members -- it's up to more than 850 million and counting -- a funny thing happened. Companies started using the site to look for employees, and Facebook members started using it to look for potential employers.

Over the past week, there's been a lot of buzz about annuities, which may be puzzling to those who still think of them as a equivalent of the cigar box under the bed in which grandpa kept his musty stash of silver certificates.

Given the volatile, erratic stock markets of the past decade and the decline of the traditional defined-benefits pension, stodgy-but-dependable investments apparently are looking pretty good to many people.The result is a renewed interest in annuities, which basically are contracts in which people pay a lump sum to an insurance company, and the company in return invests the money and makes periodic payments to retirees, either over a fixed number of years or for the remainder of their lives.