Talks & Entertainment

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In the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Mind on Plants—now out in paperback—Michael Pollan radically challenges the way we think about all drugs, from psychedelics to tea and coffee, and explores the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and their equally powerful taboos.

Since the 2018 publication of his #1 New York Times bestseller How to Change Your Mind, Pollan’s work on psychedelics has steered the national conversation on the medical potential and stigmas surrounding some of the most powerful, naturally-derived drugs. This Is Your Mind on Plants takes a close looks at three plant drugs—mescaline, opium, and caffeine—from several different angles in a blend of history, science, memoir, and participatory journalism. With firsthand insights, Pollan opens up a paradigm-shifting conversation about the role these substances play in our lives, why humans evolved a desire to change consciousness, and why so many plants evolved to make compounds that interact with human brains in such a curious way.

This groundbreaking consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world and ultimately asks us to reconsider what a drug really is. Pollan will be in conversation with Ari Shapiro, a host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”