Mysticism without religion, and the fungus that made it possible.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

A very powerful woman's story

A storm on the first night, the fear of being out of reach, and twenty years of anthropology among women migrants. Why film can carry a story further than an academic article, and the daily ethics of telling it.

Rescue

Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Beneath a floating ice shelf, warm water thins the brake that holds back the glaciers behind it. Under very high emissions the dominoes fall, and Antarctica alone could add as much as 25 centimeters to sea level by 2100. Taking that seriously would change coastal planning and where research looks next.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change

Literary modernism is an artistic movement that praises formal deviance more than any movement before it.

Literary critics rarely call a sentence bad, and they have learned to prize the moments where grammar, plot or realism break down. This thread traces that habit back to modernism, when breaking rules became a program. Not every broken rule, it argues, is a deliberate one.

Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel

Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

Most jazz records are photographs of a good live take. This one was built instead, layered, cut apart and reversed in the studio, and that is a different art rather than a better or worse version of the same one.

Sing the Color Blue

Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

One of the book’s discoveries is the simple realization that experience has a history at all.

What is experience, exactly? The question has rarely been asked, and one answer is that experience has a history: it has not always been possible, and it has changed over time. Literature, art, music and philosophy trace that history, which ends in memoir.

Experience: A History