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.