Consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think. Carhart-Harris
Changing the course of history or, in a great many more cases, the course of their own lives. No doubt is the key. I can think of a couple of ways to account for such a phenomenon, neither entirely sa...
[David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty...
You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the...
You have just dined, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. The
You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat...
Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)
Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don’t do well on raw food: they can’t maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees...
With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth who doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos...
Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after...
When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spi...
What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your great grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You’re standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a...
Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience—something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper—could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how o...
Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psil...
This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone. A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the...
The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had d...
The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.
The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but health is simply not one of them, because it is...
Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth century America. Even after cane plantations were planted in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans...It wasn't until late in the...
Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of respon...