h+ Magazine

Please, readers! If you experience disinterest, apathy, ennui, malaise, dysthymia, lassitude, or neurasthenia as you peruse this essay... click away to safety!

Mirth as medicine was first prescribed in the 14th century when Henri de Mondeville — the “Father of French surgery” — asked hospital visitors to give joie de vivre to his patients via jokes.

I’m writing the Forever young columns for transhumanists who want to live longer than the longest-lived human to date. Frenchwoman Jeanne calment was born in 1875 and died in 1997 at the “old age” of 122 years and 164 days.

Just as the Manhattan Project was conceived in 1942 to beat the Germans to the atomic bomb during World War II, the “Manhattan Beach Project” was founded as an “all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer – aging,” according to project organizer David A. Kekich.

Immortality Seeker? Yes, I am. Epicurean? Ditto. I enjoy flavorgasmic satiety in the foodie troughs of San Francisco. Daily I ingest about 3,600 oily, spicy calories.

"Daddy, when are you going to die?" asks my daughter Zenobia, age five. "Yeah, how much longer do you really think you can live?" says big sister, Tallulah, age nine.

Morris Johnson isn’t your typical longevity researcher, if such a thing can be claimed to exist. Johnson doesn’t have the usual alphabet soup of accreditations following his name, but a childhood epiphany drives his interest in the mastery of human mortality.

I just got back from a short trip to Mexico where I went for the express purpose of having a few grams of placental tissue transplanted beneath the skin of my lower abdomen.

The laws are complicated, and not stacked in your favor, but if done carefully it’s possible to leave a huge death benefit payoff from your life insurance policy to your cryonically-preserved self.

Because of the four-plus centuries of Ottoman occupation, the folklore of all Balkan nations shares a Trickster figure named Hodja.