The psychedelic utopia is a lie

“We are going to usher in a new day in the treatment of psychiatric diagnoses and brain health disorders.”

Rob Barrow is the CEO of MindMed: a leader in a new species of pharmaceutical firm. These companies, described as “corporadelic”, …

America needs to calm down

Wherever you look someone is sounding the alarm about how America has been taken over by evil extremists and is going to hell in a handbasket. This sort of talk used to be confined to the fringes: you’d actually have …

Who is Germany preparing to fight?

The Berlin elite is quick to lambast other countries for any perceived lack of predictability. Being berechenbar or “reckonable” ranks high among the Teutonic virtues. So Germany’s own recent policy gyrations have been wondrous to behold.

The attack on Ukraine …

The antidote to America’s race wars

The date 1619 does not appear in the introduction to African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer’s encyclopaedic, magisterial new book. But the controversial project that takes that date as its name — launched …

Lock up your cats

Back in the last century, “putting the cat out” was a definite thing. You might remember the excellent zeugma from Flanders & Swann’s Have Some Madeira, M’Dear: “he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the …

The dangers of gender-affirmative care

The Biden administration recently announced a plan to ban “conversion therapy” and dismantle barriers to “gender-affirming care” for transgender-identifying children and adolescents. A few days later, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the  “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Capitol Hill which sought …

How we forgot Elvis

The most telling line in Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Elvis comes at the very end, in the form of a title card: “His influence on music and culture lives on.” As I left the cinema, exhausted and annoyed, I wondered …