• Write your autobiography when you’re 1000 years old. Aubrey de Grey, British biogerontologist, says we could be living for centuries — if we just get serious about funding and discovering the techonology.
• The post 9/11 Afghanistan needs private investment more than aid, says Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan.



• That childhood sweatshirt you donate to Goodwill might come back to haunt you, as Jacqueline Novogratz’s did when she went jogging in Rwanda — and ran into a kid wearing a sweatshirt with her name on it, literally. Watch the short lecture by this founder of Acumen Fund, and hear about how “The question isn’t ‘how do we fix this?’ The question is ‘How can we help Africans to do this for themselves?’”
• Environmentalist Curtis White lambasts the environmental movement for conceptualizing the environmental cause within the confines of capitalism’s systems and “languages of science and bureaucracy” in the Orion.

  Curtis says: “It is because we have accepted this rationalist logos as the only legitimate means of debate that we are willing to think that what we need is a balance between the requirements of human economies and the “needs” of the natural world…. Environmentalism seems to conclude that the best thing it can do for nature is make a case for it, as if it were always making a summative argument before a jury with the backing of the best science.”

  A bit overblown in my view (I still don’t get his problem with the word “ecology”), but an insigtful look at the way environmentalism gets conceptualized within a capitalist society.

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