Chapter 6, Branding Birth Control, examines how birth-controllers used claims about medical works’ vulnerability to destruction under the Hicklin test to distance contraception from immorality, frame its advocacy as a free speech issue, and generate publicity for the cause. Contraception pamphlets first published by radicals in the 1820s and 1830s had long been sold by both social reformers and pornographers. In 1876, a figure with feet in both domains was arrested for selling Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). The following year, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh engineered their own arrest for selling it. The chapter examines the selective publication history that Bradlaugh and Besant constructed to divorce Fruits from its associations with promoscuity and promote contraception advocacy as a respectable, progressive cause, and shows that birth-controllers went on to sell huge volumes of literature on contraception. Although they encountered relatively little legal opposition, they often claimed that selling such works was very risky. These claims operated as a way of generating further publicity for the cause, and branding it as brave, modern, and progressive.

Life extension consists in slowing, halting, or even reversing human ageing. I will briefly review why many reputable geroscientists believe this is possible. This raises three areas of ethical concern. First, some people argue that extended life is not desirable, and that we are better off without it. I explain why these are mostly bad arguments, and why, for most people, the advantages of extended life will outweigh whatever disadvantages it may have. The second concern is that widespread use of life extension will cause overpopulation. The third concern is that life extension will be so expensive that not everyone will be able to get it, and this is unjust. These are legitimate concerns, but not insurmountable. After reviewing the ethical issues behind these concerns, I argue that we should develop life extension and make it available provided that we take steps to avoid overpopulation and to distribute life extension fairly.

For over two millennia, China has sustained the largest single human society on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated agrarian systems in history. Even until quite recent, agriculture occupied a central place in the Chinese economy, commanding a dominant 60 to 70 percent of the total economy throughout. Agricultural institutions define the Chinese economic system and agricultural production drove long-run economic change or growth in China. Agriculture was at the center of the Great Divergence debate. Agricultural harvest or failures sometimes spelled the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. Moving to the modern era, Chinese agriculture became the scapegoat for China’s modernization failure and was regarded as the incubator for Communist revolution. However, given its overriding importance, research on modern Chinese agriculture has been surprisingly understudied for the last few decades.