Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

By

Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48
NYRB

Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath you. Now imagine lying in a field, or on the forest floor. The same applies, though we rarely think of it: the dirt beneath you, whether a mile or a foot deep, is teeming with more organisms than researchers can quantify. Their best guess is that there are as many as one billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil. Plant roots plunge and swerve like superhighways with an infinite number of on-ramps. And everywhere there are probing fungi. [Read more…]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

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Reviewed by Mike Jay

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
by Dr. Carl L. Hart
Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94
NYRB

The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only around 1900 that it developed a more specialized meaning, uniting what had previously been a disparate group of pharmaceutical products, chemicals used in medical research, and herbal intoxicants. Initially, this new usage of “drugs” referred to toxic and addictive substances that were to be taken only under the direction of a physician. Once the trade in these substances was criminalized in the early twentieth century, the word connoted illegality. [Read more…]