Articles Published in Slate
The Trip of a Lifetime: Michael Pollan explores what LSD and other psychedelics can do for the no longer young.
If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.”
The Holy Church of Food
His master stroke is a ringing declaration of nutritional independence: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."