Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging. In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often "ran parallel to existing research" and were not "demonstrably wrong."

Tells the story of how foraging from neighborhood fruit trees can lead to a radical encounter. Explains psychogeography, which is a way of wandering through urban landscapes and being attracted and repulsed by the built environments you find along the way. Douglas Lain has written a book about urban foraging as a psychogeographic wander. It is a philosophy book, a memoir, and a radical self-help book for people living during an epoch when the self is under siege. This is a book that aims to derail the reader and the author. "Pick Your Battle" was successfully funded through Kickstarter on July 13th, 2010. Using the foraging of fruit trees and blackberry bushes as the jumping off point, this surreal effort towards an event or an act that might change the coordinates of our collective situation shows that, during a time of economic collapse, limitless war, and peak insanity just stepping outside and getting to know the plant life in your neighborhood can constitute a radical break.