The oldest baby boomers are turning 60 this year.

"Recently I have been embarrassed to be part of this generation," writes Albert Brooks, comedian and boomer himself, in a guest essay in this week's Newsweek cover package, "Ready or Not, Boomers Turn 60."

"The reason?" he continues: "Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue is never wrong. They're the neighbor across the street that sees you in the way you don't see yourself. They're young, they're cocky, and what they say about the older generation becomes the truth. ... According to them, we started out changing the world, and now we're most concerned about our retirement plan. And just to rub it in, they're using the greatest songs from our generation and combining them with images of people with gray hair having fun, enjoying life, buying products and running in slow motion. They are taking the very things we were born to change and are now shoving them down our throats, with our own music as the lubricant."

As part of a boomer cover package in its Nov. 14 issue, Newsweek reports on "Hitting 60" and includes a "Test your Boomer Knowledge" quiz. In one year, 1946, 3.4 million Americans were born, a jump from 2.8 million just the year before (at the height of World War II) and 2.4 million a decade earlier (in the midst of the Depression).

In honor of their latest milestone, the magazine takes a look at the generation that vowed to stay forever young. The magazine finds that boomers face concerns about finances, their health and the state of the world — but it's not as if they're getting old.

To say boomers expect to stay young isn't just a figure of speech, it is a statistically verifiable fact.

"Baby boomers literally think they're going to die before they get old," says J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Partners, the polling company, which found in one study that boomers defined "old age" as starting three years after the average American was dead.

People 60 years old today have an actuarial life expectancy of 82.3, but boomers don't consider themselves bound by the laws of statistics; they "fully expect that advances in healthcare and genomics are going to enable them to live past 100," says Smith.

The boomer credo in a nutshell: There are good years left. A 60-year-old who expects to live to 100 is only halfway through adulthood. They are intent on refuting Pablo Picasso's maxim that "one starts to get young at the age of 60, and then it's too late."

For boomers, it's never too late.

Learn more: www.Newsweek.com