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Jul 7, 2024 | 
waterstones.com | Mike Jay
A global history of intoxication, exploring the international spectrum of drug use in cultures across the world, from prehistory to the present day. Every society is a high society. Every day, people drink coffee on European terraces, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets, take cocoa leaf on Andean mountainsides and smoke tobacco in every nation on earth.
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May 2, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Mike Jay
What does science tell us about MDMA? It is currently telling us a great deal, and the news is overwhelmingly positive. Over the past decade psychedelic research has made a spectacular ascent from a network of marginalized enthusiasts to the highest peaks of the academy.
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Apr 28, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Mike Jay
Russell Newcombe, who has died aged 66 of lung cancer, was an advocate of progressive policies on illicit drug use and the first person to use the term “harm reduction” to describe an alternative path to the punitive goals of the “war on drugs”.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Kenneth Miller |Mike Jay
Why do we sleep? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the course of a day.
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Jan 16, 2024 | 
audible.com | Benjamin Breen |Mike Jay |Charles King |Olivia Laing
Subscribe to our Daily Deal emails and never miss a great deal. Daily Deals are available only to Audible customers in the US and Canada.
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Aug 10, 2023 | 
lmtonline.com | Mike Jay |Rachel Nuwer |Federico Perelmuter
Yale University Press. 359 pp. $32.50 - - - I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World By Rachel Nuwer Bloomsbury. 373 pp.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | Mike Jay
In 1770 a new perfume shop opened in the centre of Paris on the rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, a fragrant oasis adjoining a district that was, according to one contemporary, ‘by far the worst-smelling place in the world’. This stretch of the Right Bank was home to an abattoir, a fish market, a butcher, an overcrowded prison and a mortuary, whose combined effluvia flowed through open sewers directly into the Seine.
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Jun 13, 2023 | 
tttpodcast.com | Leonard Grigoryan |Mike Jay
By the 1880s customers could buy all sorts of branded pills, lozenges and ‘tabloids’ in these shops. These variously promised to relieve aliments like stomach cramps, sore throats and exhaustion and they were very often marketed under cheerful names like ‘Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup’. But in these bottles was danger as well as relief. Their ingredients were not usually listed, but in them were powerful substances like opium, alcohol and cocaine.
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May 10, 2023 | 
nautil.us | Mike Jay
Nullius in Verba—Nothing on authority. In 1660, on the eve of its founding, The Royal Society of London took this defiant Latin phrase as its motto. For the United Kingdom’s main scientific body, it announced a new way of thinking that came to dominate the scientific revolution: Classical and scholastic authority could prove apocryphal. Only direct evidence, generated by experiment and first-person observation, revealed scientific truth.
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May 3, 2023 | 
publicdomainreview.org | Mike Jay
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.
