A bottle of LSD from a Swiss clinical trial for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients, circa 2007, conducted by Dr. Peter Gasser, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Ladies and gentlemen, the ongoing incursion of the new psychedelic research renaissance into the mainstream American mediasphere has officially reached critical mass. Behold NPR: Today,…
Category: Society & Culture
Apocalyptic America: Our psychic lens of doom and gloom
Stefany Anna Goldberg recently offered some interesting reflections on the reality and nature of America’s enduring obsession with the idea and sense of an impending apocalypse. She rightly points out that, culturally speaking, the roots of this tendency extend all the way down to a positively genetic level: America is a nation rooted in Apocalypse….
How “the news” creates a fake hyperworld in our heads
This absorbing video condenses the message presented by philosopher Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual, whose basic thesis and purpose is described by the publisher as follows: We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day . . . but…
Lost in translation: Disastrous foreign renderings of American brand names and ad slogans
During my undergraduate days, I learned from one of my communication professors that the Coca-Cola company ran into an unexpected complication during their initial incursions into Chinese markets when the very name of the product caused mass confusion. Apparently, the syllables “ko-ka-ko-la” are nonsensical in Mandarin, where they can be taken to mean, roughly, âbite…
Russell Brand: Don’t trust politicians, big business, or the media
Here’s Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian this past Friday the 13th about his recent experience at the GQ awards (from which he was ejected for cracking jokes about the event’s sponsor), and speaking some serious truth to, or rather about, power (with emphases added by me): What are politicians doing at Glastonbury and the…
Dystopia now: We’re living in (and living out) a real-life “Harrison Bergeron” scenario
Rebecca Solnit, writing in London Review of Books: In or around June 1995 human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was…
Teeming Links – September 13, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Far Away from Solid Modernity (Revolution: Global Trends and Regional Issues) Zygmunt Bauman on liquid modernity and our unfolding apocalypse. “[We live in a society] which, moving relentlessly towards the apocalypse, does not care (does not want to care or is not able to) about the security and…
Teeming Links – September 3, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading, here are passages from a hypnotic meditation on solitude, inner silence, reading, and the literary vocation by Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her new book The Faraway Nearby: Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when…
Teeming Links – August 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word simply has to go to Ben Godar, who, in a marvelous little piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, offers exactly what we’ve all been frantically (if unwittingly) yearning for during our past two decades of seeking total fulfillment in cyberspace: Are you tired of being in…
‘The Innovation of Loneliness’ – A short film about social networks, society, and the self
Here’s a new must-watch short film about the ironic reality of so-called “social media” that promise to create real community and human relationship but really function to generate a new kind of loneliness. Beware “liking” or retweeting, which may well unleash waves of paradox that will warp the inner mind, rip a hole in the…