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In the Age of the Psychonauts

Frank R. Paul, 1924. Forrest J. Ackerman Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Erik Davis | An excerpt adapted from High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies | The MIT Press | 2019 | 35 minutes (9,207 words)

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the future discovers a tightrope walker preparing to perform in front of a crowd. It is here, crucially, that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero of the spirit. Humanity, he says, is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that passes over the abyss.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.” Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a predilection for risky behavior, these radical free thinkers are “curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Nietzsche simply calls them those who attempt. Their truths are their own, rather than general facts, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least as guests.”

Sounds to me like Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries to mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics. Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Antidotes to Loneliness (Podcast)

Neil Young. (Dave J Hogan/Getty Images )

On our August 23, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Longreads Head of Fact-Checking Matt Giles, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and a collaboration between Texas Monthly and The Texas Tribune.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


3:20 Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music.” (David Samuels, August 20, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

16:58 “The Quickening. ” (Leslie Jamison, September 2019, The Atlantic)

28:45 How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans.” (Neena Satija, August 19, 2019, Texas Monthly and The Texas Tribune)

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Venus Williams. (Jordan Mansfield / Getty Images for LTA)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Weil, Neena Satija, Dan McDougall, Leslie Jamison, and Amos Barshad.

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Betting the Farm on the Drought

AP Photo/The Courier, Karl Anderson

Seamus McGraw | Betting the Farm on a Drought | University of Texas Press | April 2015 | 41 minutes (7,419 words)

 

The sun wasn’t even up yet when Ethan Cox tugged his work boots on, along with his old barn coat, the lighter one. He knew he wouldn’t need the heavier one. He didn’t even have to check the local forecast. It was going to be warm that day, low to mid-80s as the day wore on, he guessed, pretty much the same as it had been for quite a while. He glanced out the bedroom window at the sky. It was gray and brittle. It was going to be dry, too. That was no surprise either. The first week of March 2012 had been unusually dry. So had the whole month of February. In fact, the whole winter had been warm and dry. The yuppies and the liberals across the river in St. Louis or up in Chicago or out in San Francisco and New York all talked about that as being evidence that the climate was changing, that the bill was coming due for a century’s worth of pouring all manner of poison into the atmosphere.

Ethan’s neighbors thought that was kind of amusing. They saw the warm, dry weather as a godsend. After two years of record or near-record flooding, a deluge in 2011 so powerful that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to blow up the levees along the Mississippi River to keep Cairo, Illinois, from being washed off the map and such brutal rainstorms a year earlier that the region suffered $3 billion in losses and crop and infrastructure damage that forced many farmers in the region to the brink of bankruptcy, to them the unseasonably warm and dry spring of 2012 was a sign from above that the worst was over, at least for now.

Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: One of the Most Important Pieces of Our Time, Plus Rats and French Cooking (Podcast)

"The Council Held By The Rats," by Gustave Doré. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

On our August 16, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Longreads Head of Fact-Checking Matt Giles share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, Eater, and Hakai Magazine.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


3:05 “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” (Nikole Hannah-Jones, August 14, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

16:13 Super Sad True Chef Story, (Samuel Ashworth, August 12, 2019, Eater)

22:53 The Rat Spill” (Sarah Gilman, August 13, Hakai Magazine)

 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

FORT MONROE, VA - MARCH 26: The sun sets near the Old Point Comfort Lighthouse at Fort Monroe National Monument on Tuesday March 26, 2019 in Fort Monroe, VA. The area was once known as Old Point Comfort. It is believed that some of the first Africans to live at Jamestown first landed here in 1619. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine Staff, Melissa del Bosque, Nitasha Tiku, Sarah Gilman, and Tift Merritt.

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Editor’s Roundtable: Escape the Podcast

Hedge mazes: the original escape rooms? (C. Gerolimetto / De Agostini via Getty Images)

On our August 9, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Books Editor Dana Snitzky, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Slate, The Cut, and The Goods by Vox.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


3:22 “The Dark History Behind the Year’s Bestselling Debut Novel” (Laura Miller, July 30, 2019, Slate)

12:40 Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy” (Rebecca Traister, August 6, 2019, The Cut)

23:29The Great Escape” (Rachel Sugar, August 7, 2019, The Goods by Vox)

 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Toni Morrison. (David Levenson/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Rachel Sugar, Kate Knibbs, Mark Arax, and Anna Wiener.

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Nashville contra Jaws, 1975

Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

J. Hoberman | An excerpt adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan | The New Press | July 2019 | 30 minutes (8,492 words)

June 1975, six weeks after Time magazine headlined the Fall of Saigon as “The Anatomy of a Debacle” and wondered “How Should Americans Feel?,” brought two antithetical yet analogous movies: Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each in its way brilliantly modified the cycle of “disaster” films that had appeared during Richard Nixon’s second term and were now, at the nadir of the nation’s self­-esteem, paralleled by the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam and the unprecedented Watergate drama.

In fact, in their time, Jaws and Nashville were regarded as Watergate films and, indeed, both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act in the summer of 1974. On May 2, three days after Richard Nixon had gone on TV to announce that he was turning over transcripts of forty-­two White House tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, the Jaws shoot opened on Martha’s Vineyard with a mainly male, no-­star cast. The star was the shark or, rather, the three mechanical sharks — one for each profile and another for stunt work — that, run by pneumatic engines and launched by a sixty-­five­-foot catapult, were created by Robert Mattey, the former Disney special effects expert who had designed the submarine and giant squid for the 1956 hit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Brought to Martha’s Vineyard in pieces and cloaked in secrecy, Mattey’s sharks took longer than expected to become fully operational, and Jaws was further delayed by poor weather conditions. Accounts of the production routinely refer to the movie itself as a catastrophe only barely avoided: “All over the picture shows signs of going down, like the Titanic.”

In late June, a month when Jaws was still unable to shoot any water scenes, and while Nixon visited the Middle East and Soviet Union in a hapless attempt to, as the president wrote in his diary, “put the whole Watergate business into perspective,” Altman’s cast and crew arrived in the city of Nashville. They were all put up at the same motel, with everyone expected to stick around for the entire ten­-week shoot.

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie. Even by Altman’s previous standards, Nashville seemed a free­form composition. It surely helped that neophyte producer Jerry Weintraub’s previous experience lay in managing tours, for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley among others, and packaging TV specials. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during an interview on May 18, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Connie Bruck, the San Francisco Chronicle Staff, Justin Heckert, Kent Babb, and Rob Harvilla.

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