September 21, 2022
Read time: ± 4 minutes
New here? The WC is a selection of five useful, interesting & notable insights, handpicked by our CIO Wyatt Cavalier and pumped into your inbox every Wednesday.
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Table of Contents
Wanna live to 120? It’ll only cost you $100k.
It’s all a bit reminiscent of that sort of terrible Justin Timberlake film, a Canadian company is offering to help you live forever (or at least to 120) if you’ve got enough cash.
For the super reasonable sum of $100k, you can join Longevity House.
Longevity House is a private and exclusive 9000 sqft oasis situated on a 1/2 acre lot, backing onto a ravine in west Toronto. A curated environment mixing the best of luxury, privacy, technology, expertise, and ancestral grounding in nature.
It’s a biohacking tech bro nirvana.
Reactions have been predictably mixed, with not everyone quite onboard with the idea.
Oddly (or perhaps not) there aren’t any female members of Longevity House yet. As someone who’s well-aware that his wife is far more sensible about these things (and everything), that’s a bit of a red flag for me.
But if you’ve got the cash and have already donated the vast majority of your fortune to making other peoples’ lives better, maybe it’s worth a punt. In the meantime, you can watch a trailer demonstrating one possible outcome of this sort of stuff —
Wanna save 400k babies from Malaria?
Malaria is a scourge that’s wreaked havoc on the most vulnerable among us for centuries.
While significant progress has been made with bed nets and insecticides, there are still 229m cases and 409k deaths each year. Most of those deaths are babies and infants.
But now there’s hope. A new vaccine, effective in 80% of cases, has been developed by scientists at the University of Oxford. There’s already a deal in place to develop more than 100m doses per year, and each jab only costs a few dollars.
The charity Malaria No More said that recent progress meant children dying from malaria could end “in our lifetimes“.
If vaccines don’t work, there’s always mutant mosquitos.
Chess is a lot more dramatic than you think
On Monday, Magnus Carlsen quit a chess match after one move. But why would the top-ranked (and best ever) chess player do something like this?
He thought his American competitor, Hans Niemann, was cheating. Again.
Niemann — ranked 49th in the world — beat Carlsen two weeks prior in a match that stunned the chess world. Carlsen then quit the tournament entirely and suggested Niemann had cheated. So when they met up again this week, Carlsen wasn’t having any of it. He quit after one move, and now he refuses to play against the young American.
Niemann does have a history of cheating. He’s admitted as much, but say’s he’s “clean” now.
Carlsen, who is only 31, has said he’s not going to defend his World Championship next year. He’s getting a bit bored of the chess circuit, and his legacy is already secure.
It sounds like he’s going to go full troll on the chess world, and this rivalry is going to heat up further.
Would your leaders do this for you?
Rahul Gandhi (no relation) is running for Prime Minister in India.
Actually, he’s walking — he and his team are walking the length of India (over 2,100 miles) to drum up support for his flagging campaign.
His Congress party suffered its worst-ever defeat in 2014, and things aren’t looking much better this year.
So what do you do? Well, of course — a massive publicity stunt!
And it’s working (more or less). May of the videos and photos released by the campaign have gone viral, though it’s not clear how well that will translate into actual votes later this year.
Remember Serial?
Do you remember the podcast by Sarah Koenig that went viral a few years ago?
The subject of the series, Adnan Syed, has been released from prison largely due to Koenig’s efforts. (h/t International Intrigue)
It’s Baltimore, 2022. Adnan Syed has spent the last 23 years incarcerated, serving a life sentence for the murder of Hae Min Lee, a crime he says he didn’t commit. He has exhausted every legal avenue for relief, including a petition to the United States Supreme Court. But then, a prosecutor in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office stumbles upon two handwritten notes in Adnan’s case file, and that changes everything.
New evidence has come to light that suggests someone else may have committed the crime, and the case’s prosecution has filed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction. He’ll be held under house arrest for a month until the court decides what to do.
This is a big win for investigative journalism. Well done to Ms. Koenig.
Cheers,
Wyatt
