Articles Published in The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Brimming with X
In his new book How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics, Michael Pollan sets out the twentieth-century history of the use of “psychedelic” substances with clarity, insight and humour. He does his fieldwork – with appropriate trepidation. He goes mushroom hunting. He consumes four different psychedelic tryptamines under suitably controlled conditions – LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca (active ingredient N, N-dimethyltryptamine, sc DMT), and, with shattering results, 5-MeO-DMT, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad Incilius alvarius – and tells us, as well as he can, what happens. He ends with two chapters laying out the latest neuroscientific speculations and describing the extraordinarily fruitful renaissance of the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy in the 1990s.
The Anxiety of Eating
I doubt that there is a book which succeeds more than The Omnivore' s Dilemma -- with its richness of information, eloquence of address, and integrity of moral purpose -- in rendering visible, and presenting for a "different" style of ethical reflection, that "profound engagement" with our world which eating represents.