Immortality, A User's Guide

Introducing a new extended series on the latest developments in—and potential social consequences of—radical life extension.

[TLDR: Next week, I’m going to start serializing a new seven-part extended essay here for paying subscribers called Immortality: A User’s Guide. I’ll be posting a new section every two weeks, starting next Friday, with an opening chapter that will be available for all subscribers, paying or not. (After that, only paid subscribers will receive installments.) There’s also an audio version developed in partnership with the Next Big Idea Club.]

Whatever legitimate complaints we might have about the changes the digital age has imposed on the world of culture, I think you can make the case that one undeniable benefit has been liberating creators from the predetermined formats of length. If you feel like the correct length for your movie is three hours and twenty-six minutes—as apparently Martin Scorsese does for his upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon—you can just go for it, assuming you have the budget. (If viewers want to break it up and binge watch at home over a few days, once it arrives in streaming form, they can.) If you think your latest album should clock in at exactly 22 minutes, or two hours, you can just release it at that length, without trying to negotiate with the record label over whether it should fit on an EP or a double album. (I remember being blown away in my conversation last year with David Byrne by his observation that in the days of vinyl LPs, if you wanted to squeeze a few extra tracks on your album and push past the 42 minute limit, you had to remove bass frequencies from the mix so that the physical grooves on the record would be smaller.) There is something to be said for the productive role that arbitrary conventions can play in shaping creative work. But it can’t be good for culture to be locked into such rigid temporal constraints.

I think this is particularly true for the written word. If you’re a nonfiction writer thinking about the right format for a new idea, historically you’ve pretty much had to choose between two primary formats: a magazine article and a book. Measured in word count, that’s effectively a choice between a few thousand words and somewhere north of 50,000 words. Sure, you can condense a book down to 40,000 words and make it work, and if you’re very lucky, you can find a magazine willing to publish an 8,000 word essay. (One of the most fortunate things that ever happened to me as a writer has been developing a relationship with the Times Magazine where they let me write a piece at that length every year or so.) But that vast zone that separates 5,000 and 50,000 words is generally unoccupied.

That wasteland has, at other points in the history of publishing, actually been a genuinely fertile region. The pamphleteers of the 17th and 18th century often composed works in that general range. (Common Sense clocked in around 20,000 words, for instance.) Works of persuasion can perform wonderfully at that length: long enough to build a substantive case for an argument, with concrete supporting evidence, without having to overload the reader with filler, or invent other arguments to get the whole thing to traditional book length. You often hear people dismiss books with the all-too-easy critique “it should have been an article” but the truth is compressing an interesting idea book down to 3,000 words is a hugely lossy exercise; there’s a complexity that inevitably gets sacrificed at that traditional magazine length. But not necessarily at 20,000 words.

The same goes for historical stories. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stumbled across some fascinating tale in the archives that connects with themes that I’m interested in, but that just doesn’t have a sufficient number of layers, or enough plot twists, to sustain an entire book. I’ve probably got a dozen narratives in that category sitting in my spark file, waiting to be written.

All of which is to say: I’ve been complaining about this strange gap for twenty years. But now I’m finally doing something about it.

Here are the facts: next week, I’m going to start serializing a new seven-part extended essay here for paying subscribers called—playfully, I promise you—Immortality: A User’s Guide. I’ll be posting a new section every two weeks, starting next Friday. All of you will be able to read the opening section, which will explain what this new project is all about, but the elevator pitch is this: we might well be on the cusp of a revolution in the science of aging and we are not prepared for the consequences. If you thought the last six months of public debate about breakthroughs in AI have been intense, just wait until people start to wrestle in earnest with the idea that advances in science and technology may radically transform the potential length of human life–at a rate much more dramatic than the steady, incremental progress that I documented in Extra Life.

Immortality is a mix between a popular science essay and one of those old-school pamphlets, introducing a series of important new developments in our understanding of aging and ruminating a bit on What It All Means. It begins—as you will see next week—with one of my favorite stories of all time, but after that it segues into an exploration of the paradigm shift in our understanding of aging, and then tries to wrestle with what we should do, as a society, when we confront potential changes of this magnitude.

I generally don’t interrupt my Substack posts with subscribe buttons, but it’s probably worth it to make an exception in this case for those of you who are not yet on the paid subscription plan.

In addition to the serialized text version here at Substack, I’ve partnered with The Next Big Idea Club — an idea delivery platform curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink — to create an audio version of Immortality. It features immersive sound design, archival footage, and interviews with longevity experts. You can access it by downloading The Next Big Idea app. There you will also find hundreds of book summaries, written and read by the authors themselves (including yours truly), dozens of e-courses, and invitations to live author Q&As. I’ll have links to that next week—and I think a special discount offer for Adjacent Possible subscribers.

I’m really proud what we did with Immortality—and not just because I composed the score for the audio version!—but I should mention that I am just as interested in exploring this mid-sized form with historical narratives along the lines of The Ghost Map or Enemy of All Mankind. If this experiment works out, maybe I’ll do one of those next. (The serial format works even better for storytelling—imagine the cliffhanger possibilities!) That would be an ideal outcome for me creatively: write a full-length book every two or three years, and then write one or two longform essays—accompanied by rich audio productions—in this format each year. (If you’re interested in the economics of all this, I’d need about five percent of you to sign up for a paying subscription to justify the work that goes into these kinds of projects.) Whatever happens, I’ll likely try this experiment at least one more time. I spent too many years in grad school reading Dickens not to try my hand at serial publishing. So as the old saying goes: stay tuned.

---

One other note: We just published the latest installment in the Hidden Heroes series with Netguru, this one on software pioneer Grace Hopper. The mix of natural language and advanced computing that we’ve seen in the rise of large language models seems like a recent advance, but it has roots that go back to the birth of the digital age. No one was more influential in driving the idea that digital machines should interact with humans via ordinary language than Hopper, and as others have pointed out, she recognized far earlier than most of her peers how important software would become as computers went mainstream. Hopper’s was a truly inspiring career—it was a real treat to write about her for the series.