Missives
Keep track of what's happened since you were last here with the newsletters and the changelog.
February 14, 2025
Changelog
Last week I was supposed to do this week’s article, and got distracted by a cool feature of the study of language regions of the brain. Anyway, I updated last week’s article to stand alone, and this week’s article is what it should have been. If you read last weeks’ you can skip the intro to this weeks’ and just dive right in.
January 2, 2025
Changelog
A few changes over the last couple months to the site.
First, I now have a sort of ‘tour’ of the site I’m calling Animals First. It does a little handholding around the threads on the site, since all my playing around with the website doesn’t always make things so navigable.
Second I have a landing page for more applied stuff, I’m calling Karstica. People sometimes ask me to do stuff for money, and it’s not always appropriate to send them to the main page since I publish on a pretty wide range of topics. I’ll collect more practical content and such there.
Lastly, in trying to make the website a bit more mobile friendly and app-like, I have adjusted all the article listings to pop-up with an excerpt and ideology so you can figure out whether you want to read it before navigating to it. I’d be interested to hear if this is easier or harder to use. There is a known issue where sometimes the excerpt is wrong. No idea yet why that happens.
Happy new year!
December 12, 2024
Changelog
A big series of articles largely around the psychology of groups and leadership will take precedence over the next few weeks as I (re)familiarise myself with the content we teach at my new job.
December 8, 2024
Changelog
Updated On managing magic mushroom experiences to include a section specifically on risks of harm. Most of the literature, as you can expect, is on clinical use, and the literature that isn’t is pretty vague (again, as you’d expect from survey data recruiting from drug-use forums). But some clear points emerge—relative to other drugs, especially alcohol, psychedelics are astonishingly safe, and become even safer with careful, thoughtful, and better yet supervised use. Which is something you might have anticipated, given the rise of legal jurisdictions and use in clinical settings. But the ‘enduring changes’ that make them so appealing for clinical use are exactly the thing we should be taking care to think about, because there’s no guarantee these enduring changes need to be a good thing.