New York magazine’s cover story this week is a piece based on some of the ideas you’ll read about in The Number. The article is titled, “Nailing the New York Number.” It discusses what it will take to live happily ever after in the Big Apple – financially and emotionally. There’s reporting in the piece that won’t be found in the book, notably an encounter with a fascinating character named Marvin Tolkin, 79, who is healthy, wealthy, and remarkably wise about what a good Number can do for you and what it can’t.

The piece touches on several of the lessons Marvin learned about what constitutes a happy second-half, many of which, he said, he discovered while observing his father’s retirement. When Irving Tolkin exited his successful apparel company at 62, he didn’t get on a plane and hole up behind shutters in a Fort Lauderdale condo. (A good thing, especially this week, hurricane-wise.) Instead, Irving stayed in New York and did everything the self-help books say a person should. “He became involved at the New School,” Marvin explained to me. “He took up the piano. He painted. And, never having been Bar Mitzvahed, he even learned to daven. But these were all things he did within himself, and they were great, but they weren’t enough,” Marvin went on. “He’d have been much happier had he not overlooked the most important thing of all –the need to be needed.”

This so-called need to be needed, the need to be engaged with others as we journey (or stagger) through old age, strikes most of us young bucks as hopelessly mushy — especially in New York, where you don’t get laughs at dinner parties by revealing a heart on your sleeve. When I told New York friends about my conversations with Marvin, they nodded politely as they signaled for another martini. And yet — I explain this more fully in the book – you can’t achieve anything resembling a coherent financial plan without first figuring out a more difficult calculation: what kind of life do you want when you’re sixty, seventy, eighty, and beyond? Only then can you intelligently start tapping on your calculator keys.

In any event, check out New York magazine on the newsstand. And while you’re standing there, you might as well thumb through Time, which is probably just a few magazines away. Its cover story is “The Great Retirement Ripoff,” a scary accounting of how many companies, aided and abetted by Congress, are screwing millions of old, faithful employees out of promised benefits. The simultaneous publication of these two covers was not lost on the eagle-eyed observers at Gawker.com, an online gossip site based in New York. Gawker ran photos of the two covers under the headline: “We Were Unaware That It Was AARP Media Awareness Week.” As the author of one of the stories, I assure you there was no such conspiracy or, as the Gawkers put it, any attempt at “a friendly kick in the balls from your neighborhood media outlets.”

So, welcome to New York, which is not just a nice place to visit, it also can be — not to be mushy — a fine place to retire, for reasons explained in the story.

This is an unsettling stretch, the time after a manuscript leaves one’s hands and before it surfaces again between two covers. If you are sitting on a work of timely controversy, this is the calm before the storm. For most others — as one cheeky book editor (not mine) likes to say — it’s the calm before the calm. Either way, what’s unsettling is that the world goes on, and your manuscript is in no position to defend itself. In the case of The Number, there could be a huge market crash (not likely, but always possible); or something on the order of a legislative overhaul of Social Security (fat chance).

So far, the biggest news story of the interregnum has been Katrina, and the devastation it has wreaked on poor and rich alike, from society’s most powerless all the way up to Trent Lott. Now that Katrina’s floodwaters are receding, reporters find themselves sifting through rubble in search of story lines that were (deservedly) overlooked in the immediate aftermath. Last week, The New York Times ran a piece about how it’s smart to keep one’s financial records stored on a handy U.S.B. drive, something easily grabbed along with pooch and photo albums in the rush of a panicky escape. The piece reassuringly noted that all you need to do to get ready is spend a few weekend hours gathering and scanning account numbers, legal papers, credit card info, bank statements, insurance policies, and other financial documents you’ll need during reconstruction.

Sound advice. The items listed happen to be the same raw ingredients a decent financial adviser will tell you one needs to work up a comprehensive financial plan for the future — a task, by the way, best undertaken while the sun shines. Yet very few of us ever go to the trouble, in good weather or bad. Preparedness? Brownie, you’re not alone here. We don’t do a heck of a job, either.