Peter Rubin

Oakland

Head Of Publishing at Automattic

@provenself on Threads. @longreads and @atavist at @automattic. no longer notable.

Articles

The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Joseph Clements fell in love with LSD as a teenager. Later, as Akasha Song, he fell in love with DMT even harder, learning how to extract it from jurema bark so that he could share it with his fellow psychonauts. People gonna people, though, so sharing became selling, and selling became selling at scale, and selling at scale became a multimillion-dollar empire that made Scarface seem penny-ante.
The Reenchanted World

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Whether or not you’ve read his six-volume opus My Struggle (I haven’t), you likely have some expectations when you see Karl Ove Knausgaard’s byline. Here, the Norwegian author doesn’t disappoint: He takes on Technology with a capital T, tracing the arc of alienation from childhood to our current moment in which, he argues, experience itself has vaporized. Hypnotic and plainspoken in exactly the way you hope—and for all its angst, not without hope.
Pirates of the Ayahuasca

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

What do you do when the world is so overwhelming that you can’t see the next step forward? You head to Peru for a week of guided ego death, courtesy of the powerful hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca. For n+1, Sarah Miller chronicles her journey to the center of the self. Spoiler: The self is a slippery beast, and Madre Ayahuasca isn’t interested in easy resolutions.
The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch

3 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

During the pandemic, Forrest Wickman got into birds. So into birds, in fact, that he started noticing when birdcalls in movies didn’t match up with the birds that were actually on screen. And nothing was quite so egregiously mismatched as a particular bird who appears in 2000’s Charlie’s Angels and is definitively not a pygmy nuthatch. Thankfully, Forrest Wickman is as obsessive about the truth as he is about birds, and his curiosity led him down a doozy of a rabbit hole.
Fried Fish & Family Affairs

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Sarah Golibart Gorman wasn’t born on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, but she grew up there—a “come here” rather than a “from here.” Not that any of that mattered years later, when she slid into a booth with her family and ordered drum ribs for the first time. A fascinating look at the underappreciated delicacy of an underappreciated part of the country.
How to Survive a Purge: The Secret Diary of a DoJ Staffer

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

The mass firings at government agencies are still shocking, if not surprising. But for those inside the federal buildings, still trying to uphold their oath (and the rule of law), the emotional toll is all-encompassing. For 1843, one of the embattled employees—who helped prosecute January 6 insurrectionists, no less—describes how it feels inside the Justice Department these days. I lie awake at night going back and forth about what I should do, and have to give myself a pep talk to pull out of it.
Monumental Tiny News

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

With just a few hundred people, the town of Galisteo is probably better known to art fans and film location scouts than it is to most New Mexicans. But that hasn’t stopped 88-year-old force of nature Lucy Lippard from publishing the weekly local paper El Puente de Galisteo for almost three decades. For CJR, Lucy Schiller visits Lippard to find out more about the long-running, nearly single-handed labor of love.
Radioactive Man - Longreads

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Frank Vera III served in the Air Force. Frank Vera III has health problems. Frank Vera III claims that those health problems trace directly from his time at George Air Force Base, that the U.S. military refuses to take responsibility for any of it, and that the tribe of similarly afflicted veterans he has gathered constitutes proof. Maddie Crowell doesn’t know what to think.
Spaghetti Underground

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Earlier this month, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Agency unveiled new maps for the city’s famously complex subway system—well, diagrams, technically, since they’re too abstracted to be considered maps. The new design marks the first major visual overhaul since 1979; ironically enough, it’s based on Massimo Vignelli’s predecessor, which riled straphangers almost immediately after its 1972 debut (but enthralled designers).
The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him

1 month ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

In the interest of not making this about me, I’ll just say that I empathize with anyone who struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder—let alone anyone whose life has been completely upended by it the way Timmy Reen’s has. Joseph Goldstein’s feature is no less affecting for its reportorial remove, chronicling how the disease shaped Reen long before the advent of COVID brought things to a breaking point.