I do not automatically trust mainstream media, federal agencies, drug manufacturers, hospital administrators, or scientific findings, either. But when all of that is sweepingly discredited at once, and people find a niche with no referees, no factual accountability, and a cluster of superstars who seem wholesome, natural, and interested only in healing and well-being . . . they will be powerfully persuasive.
Boiled down, the problem is simple: Nice does not speak the truth. Nice dances around the truth, speaking so softly and with so much extra reassurance and bubbling niceness.
On September 14, Picture Cave—the hidden Lascaux of the Midwest—will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The auction terms also note that Picture Cave is “subject to prior sale,” should there be an exceptional pre-auction offer—so this may already be a done deal.
"Veronica Mars" is teenage in a way that takes you right back to all the angst, idealism, feverish passion, and blithe fun. But the show is also a noir crime drama that in many ways feels quite grown up.
When a woman’s nipple has been injured, scarred, or rebuilt after a mastectomy, it can be shown. When a woman’s nipple is hard at work feeding an infant, it can be shown. And no one will object if a woman’s nipple has been distanced by history and glammed up by a gold leaf frame. An artist from the Renaissance may reveal a woman’s nipple with impunity.
Painting by Jean Walgens Pierre, age 12. Dried veggies, small scoop. Red beans, big scoop. Vitamin powder, medium scoop. Rice, big scoop. Dried veggies. . . . People poured into Chaminade’s gym this morning, squinting as they tried to find friends camouflaged by hairnets and masks. Now we…
Young people despise email, even at work. I picked up on this subtle fact when every source under thirty provided only a cell number—or demanded mine. Email is seen as too formal, too anxiety-producing, and one’s phone as more casual and friendly than one’s keyboard.
Extreme and eccentric though they be, transhumanists represent a movement to take control of human evolution. Artificial intelligence will, they predict, accelerate itself into a superintelligence far more powerful than anything our human brains are capable of. The consequences? Nothing less than immortality, some say. Certainly an end to much of our disease and suffering. Maybe an end to us.
Simone Weil might not have cherished a strong sense of place or family or chummy associations herself, but she understood solidarity—and she knew it was already eroding.
We already knew to call psilocybin the magic mushroom, because it brings visions of serenity and oneness. If other fungi help us rinse away the toxins and find our balance again, we will have to acknowledge their magic, too.
Chimpanzees have been bred for lab research, infected with HIV, sent into outer space. They are vulnerable to many of the same illnesses we are, including Alzheimer’s. They also experience many of the same emotions
You see it the minute you walk into the House of Miles: his eyes, glowing light, stare back at you from a huge black-and-white photo, the one where he wears a sleeveless shirt and has his arms raised, maybe after one of the boxing workouts that helped his breath control. He learned to box right here.