Book: the Voice of Reason

A useful side-effect of publishing under a copyleft license is that one can be lazy about formally publishing compilations of past material. Sooner or later someone else will get around to it. Thus Kris Borer, a longevity community advocate, recently let me know that he has assembled and tidied up a collection of some of my short essays and published it as a book. The pictures of me that end up on conference websites (and now on a book cover) are looking ever younger than the reality these days; a reverse Dorian Gray effect in which fortunate lighting at the time of capture and additional post-processing every time someone copies an picture of me for a new use conspire to hide the lines. For all the promise of medical technology to hand and medical technology to come, we're all still aging faster than we'd like.

Aging is damage. Damage is repairable. Get to work. For nearly a quarter century, a writer known only as Reason said this almost every day - to a world that mostly wasn't listening. He said it when curing aging was a punchline. He said it as the science caught up, the first companies formed, and the money and the clinical trials arrived. He built, without quite meaning to, the most complete record we have of a scientific field being willed into existence - and then, in 2018, he stopped writing about other people's companies and founded his own.

The Voice of Reason gathers sixty-nine of his best pieces: the science of why we age and how we might not; a blistering quarrel with everyone who calls death a gift; the politics of which cures get made; his own self-experiments with biohacking; and, beneath it all, an unblinking reckoning with mortality - his readers', and his own. He is clear, he is blunt, he is often very funny, and he is angrier than you expect about the hundred thousand people who die of aging every day. He is also, it turns out, a man whose quarter-century forecast is coming true.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Quarter-Century-Fighting-ebook/dp/B0H96F89Z3

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