Month: May 2020

Carrie Fisher had a psychedelic-induced encounter with a talking acorn.  Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann recalls the time he dropped too much acid and his cymbals began melting mid-set, forcing him to leave the stage. Ben Stiller admits he only dropped acid once, and had such a bad trip that he called his parents, Jerry Stiller (who died just this week) and the late Anne Meara. These are just a few of the celebrity psychedelic experiences recounted in the entertaining new documentary film, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, now streaming on Netflix.

(Mild spoilers below.)

Psychedelics get their name from the Greek root words for "mind revealing," since they can alter cognition and perception. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is perhaps the best known, along with its popular siblings psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms); 3,4-methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA), aka ecstasy (or molly); peyote, made from the ground-up tops of cacti that contain mescaline; and ayahuasca, a bitter tea made from a Brazilian vine with the active ingredient dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Most are classified as Schedule 1 substances by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, meaning they are not deemed to have any potential medical benefits. But this is largely a remnant of the "culture wars" that raged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Enlarge (credit: Richard Newstead / Getty Images)

A Minnesota man is facing two felony charges for shooting down a drone, The Free Press reports.

The incident began when an unnamed man flew a drone over Butterfield Foods, a producer of meat products—including chicken—in the Southern Minnesota town of Butterfield. The man later told a sheriff's deputy he was trying to prove that chickens were being slaughtered because of the pandemic.

Two employees approached the man and asked him what he was doing. Soon afterwards, someone else shot the drone out of the sky. The man says his drone cost $1,900.

Frank Costanza had always been a visionary: bras for men, holidays for the perpetually annoyed, old TV Guides for hoarders. Maybe you could call it destiny in retrospect, but of course he’d eventually pivot to startups.

In October 1997, computers had already become a proven commodity. Incoming freshmen on college campuses owned 'em in droves. And for the masses, AOL had existed for awhile and already passed three million users two years earlier. (Hell, Ars Technica would be founded in just over a year.) The market didn’t exactly look ripe for the taking. But when you possess the kind of perseverance to never take your shoes off for others—whether at their homes or in a swimming pool—then to hell with what conventional wisdom says.

And so, as chronicled in what I’ve always presumed to be a documentary called Seinfeld, Frank Costanza got to work. Well, first he sat on his couch and channel-surfed through cable.

Enlarge / Obviously a very scientific brain. (credit: Johanna Parkin / Getty Images)

In mid-March, just before President Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency, Stanford psychology professor Robb Willer posted a call to arms on Twitter, asking for suggestions on how the social and behavioral sciences could help to address the pandemic. “What ideas might we have to recommend? What research could we do?” he asked. “All ideas, half-baked or otherwise, are welcome!”

Given the importance of our social interactions to the spread of the pandemic, behavioral sciences should have a lot to tell us. So Willer got a large response, and the result was a huge team effort coordinated by Willer and New York University social psychology professor Jay van Bavel. The goal: to sum up all the best and most relevant research from psychology, sociology, public health, and other social sciences. Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour last week—a lightning-fast turnaround for academia—the resulting paper highlights research that addresses behavioral questions that have come up in the pandemic, from understanding cultural differences to minimizing scientific misinformation.

Different sections, each written by researchers with expertise in that particular field, summarize research on topics from social inequality to science communication and fake news. Responding to the crisis requires people to change their behavior, the paper’s authors argue, so we need to draw on behavioral research to “help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts.”