Joanna Steinhardt at Noema Magazine:
In 1960, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote about his ayahuasca experience in Peru: “Began to sense a strange Presence in the hut—a Blind Being—or a being I am blind to habitually—like a science-fiction Radiotelepathy Beast from another Universe.” Decades later, subjects in clinical psilocybin studies describe “spirit guides” who help them navigate their trips. Last May, a Muslim religious leader told The New Yorker that she had “felt God right behind her” while under the influence of psilocybin for a study on the effects of the drug in clergy.
There are qualities to these encounters that are consistent across a range of contexts and substances, although interpreted in vastly different ways. Oftentimes, beings deliver messages or try to communicate with the user; they’re perceived as autonomous, sentient and helpful or loving; the encounters are viewed retrospectively as deeply meaningful; and they feel hyperreal, revealing a reality that is truer than our everyday experience. My experience reflected all these qualities. Over time, I began to seriously wonder: What are these entities?
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ALL THE DOUBLING MAKES Beuys a tricky figure. And it’s not clear how intentional it all was: Was his healer persona a clever conceptual act, or proof of his repression and self‑delusion? Probably both; and Spaulding does not—and presumably cannot—parse this out. Instead, he focuses on what the doubling does. Taken in good faith, Beuys’s evasive equivocating risked obstructing rather than enabling an honest reckoning with the past, Germany’s or his own. But it did something else too. Spaulding’s book centers around Beuys’s “economimeses,” a term borrowed from Derrida to describe how his work mimicked capital in order to critique it. Capital, after all, is an abstraction that mediates all social relations; Beuys wagered that art could also do this, and do it better. He made work attempting to prove this point.
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.
A story about Paul Conyngham, an AI entrepreneur from Sydney who treated his dog Rosie’s cancer with a personalized mRNA vaccine, 
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The road up to and through the White House is a partisan one. But when a President retires from the Oval Office, their path becomes much less so. That’s why the institution of the post-presidency has traditionally functioned as a genteel club in which constraints of professional courtesy restrain former presidents from commenting on the work of the current officeholder. And rightfully so: the underlying assumption has always been that while the sitting president may be doing things differently, he is nonetheless doing his best to serve the American people.
IT IS HARD to finish Heated Rivalry (2025– ) and simply move on. It has been more than a month since the first season’s finale, but people cannot stop talking about Jacob Tierney’s series for Crave, which follows two hockey superstars—the Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and the Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams)—who are forced to keep their relationship private while their rivalry plays out in public. As one viewer, a 43-year-old woman, shared online: “I found out about this series on TikTok the day after the first two episodes came out, and since November 29 I haven’t had a moment’s peace. I’ve become obsessed. I rewatch every episode every day.” Another described the show’s aftertaste as something stranger than satisfaction: “After the finale, what’s left isn’t the euphoria you get from so many series. It’s the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.” A third viewer framed the show less as escapism than as something closer to solace: “Heated Rivalry arrived in the midst of a crisis of meaning and a global epidemic of trauma and loneliness, where the hunger for intimacy and the fear of it go hand in hand. For many viewers, the series had a therapeutic effect.”
Around 4,000 years ago, one of the world’s oldest civilizations emerged: The 
ITRI is an applied R&D lab, founded to rapidly elevate Taiwan’s technological capabilities, particularly in electronics.
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Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she goes back to the Brussels material that she had already used at a tangent in The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience of studying and teaching there in 1842-4. Reworking those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporated her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she had felt for her Belgian writing tutor Constantin Heger.
When neuroscientists gather in the Spanish city of Seville in May for the annual Dopamine Society meeting, one discussion could be unusually lively. Session 31 will feature a debate between researchers who fundamentally disagree about the role dopamine has in the brain.