I was a good kid. I barely touched drugs when I was a teenager. Nor when I was at university. But then, when I was 28, I discovered LSD.
It blew my head off. But not in the way I …
Jordan Peterson wrestles with meaning
Like every conservative intellectual, Jordan Peterson once was a man of the Left. Left-wingers were hard to come by in Seventies Alberta; Peterson grew up in what was in effect a one-party state. When he was a teenager, all but …
The world belongs to late bloomers
Lots of people don’t believe in second acts, second lives, mid-life resurrections. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in The Last Tycoon, published in 1941: “There are no second acts in American lives.” But his absolutism was being embarrassed at …
The benign bullshit of Arnold Schwarzenegger
I’m not a fan of self-help books. Their prose ranges from dully functional to the equivalent of a hot-breathed salesman prefacing every sentence with your Christian name. Most of these books are based on the experience and expertise of their …
The animals trapped in human bodies
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a man who feels in his bones that he is a bear. He is a therian: someone who believes from a young age that they are an animal trapped inside a human …
Why I became a time lord
In the classic John Huston film Beat the Devil, the diminutive character actor Peter Lorre delivers a concise disquisition on the nature of time: “What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is …
The self-help guru who conquered Brazil
Brazil has grown increasingly distant from its foreign clichés, those of samba and bossa nova, sensuous coastal cities, Catholicism, cordiality, and collectivism. The Brazil that has incubated Bolsonarism is a more individualistic one, in which evangelical Christianity, popular entrepreneurialism and …
