Well, kind of...
I was hired by the previous publisher because I had been the editor of Red Herring, a business and technology magazine during the boom that was popular with entrepreneurs and VCs. The old publisher wanted me to make TR like the magazine you describe: focused on risk, progress, time-to-market, payoff. But when MIT made me the publisher as well as the editor the chief three years ago, I returned the magazine to its historical focus on emerging technologies. It's not a business magazine at all any more: it's very much concerned with applied science and the content and potential of new technologies. You should look at it again: you'd probably like it now.
As for Aubrey de Grey and his attempt to defeat aging, I mainly disapprove of the effort on scientific grounds: I think Aubrey is spouting pseudo-science and is appealing to psuedo-scientific people as a kind of religious prophet. There's no reason to think that we can therapeutically treat aging as a disease in our lifetimes. But when you speak of the moral component, I am an agnostic. I think I wrote in the piece you remember that "While I might want indefinite life for me and my loved ones, it **might** be a bad thing for the world if every one were to live indefinitely." (Or words to that effect.) I was thinking of Kants objective correlative, which says we must act on those principles that we can at the same wish were general laws.
I don't complain, it's OK to call me a douche--but what is "promotional" about Technology Review? It's the least commercial magazine in America. Indeed, if you designing a technology magazine for commercial success and advertising revenue, you would never give it so broad a range of subjects (essentially all technology) and make it focussed on emerging technologies (essentially technologies that aren't products yet and can't be sold).
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Well, kind of... I was hired by the previous publisher because I had been the editor of Red Herring, a business and technology magazine during the boom that was popular with entrepreneurs and VCs. The old publisher wanted me to make TR like the magazine you describe: focused on risk, progress, time-to-market, payoff. But when MIT made me the publisher as well as the editor the chief three years ago, I returned the magazine to its historical focus on emerging technologies. It's not a business magazine at all any more: it's very much concerned with applied science and the content and potential of new technologies. You should look at it again: you'd probably like it now. As for Aubrey de Grey and his attempt to defeat aging, I mainly disapprove of the effort on scientific grounds: I think Aubrey is spouting pseudo-science and is appealing to psuedo-scientific people as a kind of religious prophet. There's no reason to think that we can therapeutically treat aging as a disease in our lifetimes. But when you speak of the moral component, I am an agnostic. I think I wrote in the piece you remember that "While I might want indefinite life for me and my loved ones, it **might** be a bad thing for the world if every one were to live indefinitely." (Or words to that effect.) I was thinking of Kants objective correlative, which says we must act on those principles that we can at the same wish were general laws.
I don't complain, it's OK to call me a douche--but what is "promotional" about Technology Review? It's the least commercial magazine in America. Indeed, if you designing a technology magazine for commercial success and advertising revenue, you would never give it so broad a range of subjects (essentially all technology) and make it focussed on emerging technologies (essentially technologies that aren't products yet and can't be sold).