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Entering a narrowly open door, Michael Pollan explores the history–and current state–of psychedelics in mental health and brain science. Pollan brings his signature style of deep research, developing interpersonal connections with specialists, pressing his subjective experience for deeper understanding, and carefully constructed speculation.

Personally, while the history sections and the memoir portions were interesting and necessary to get a grasp on the topic, I found the brain science sections most interesting.

Pollan wisely stays within the parameters of how psychedelics work, or at least appear to work, on portions of the brain. He mostly stays there, anyway. The material is very exciting, the changes in social and medical perceptions of psychedelics, combined with contemporary discoveries in neuroscience, make it difficult to resist the urge to make hopeful extrapolations about how these chemicals can help the wounded, the fearful, the addicted, and even those whose only problem is a mundane existence in a solitary life.

If it’s an even-numbered year, it must be time for a multiverse-shattering cross-over event!

It certainly often seems that way. Dark Nights: Metal is so huge that it takes four collections to pull everything together. On the whole, it’s an amazing run with some remarkable observations about some of the DC Universe’s most important characters and their relationships.

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In the history of DC crisis crossover events, Dark Nights: Metal is likely to stand out as the one which most freaked out the readers. Metal takes elements from the history of the DC universe, literally upends them, adds fresh perspectives, and then pushes them through a meat grinder of terror and villainy. Dark Nights: Metal is not for the faint of heart, an success has an unexpected look when it is–as it must be–snatched from the slavering jaws of apparently certain and irrevocable defeat.

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Dark Days: The Road to Metal introduces the reader to the huge multiverse-shattering world of the Metal crisis crossover. A hard world, made harder and more difficult for Our Heroes lay between the covers of this volume. Things can get worse, as they can only in comic books, then then they do get worse. Then they get worse than that. It’s fun, but a long way from joyous. Tread carefully, but do tread. A powerful introduction to a compelling story which shakes the foundations of the DC Universe, and pokes the soft spots in some of the most important relationships among the characters.

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Dark Nights: Metal: Dark Knights Rising brings you your every long-wished for nightmare Batman. Crawling up from the underbelly of the DC Universe’s multiversal dark side, This volume collects several one-shot terrors where Bruce Waye, the Bruce Wayne from several alternate horror-show worlds are given the irresistible offer to Fix the World! (This volume ships on March 26, 2019.)

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Dark Nights: Metal: The Resistance. A long: title: but… a lot happens. Hope is rekindled, though it remains a weak ember. This fourth volume in the Dark Nights: Metal crisis crossover brings together a variety of hero team-ups to face down the threats from beyond reality! There is a lot of failure, a little bit of success, and a lot of mayhem–just what you want from a crisis team-up!

Dark Nights: Metal winds up, as crisis crossover extravaganzas in the DC Universe must, rebooting everything, changing it all, changing nothing, clearing the decks, and preserving continuity. But that’s for the future. For the moment we can enjoy Dark Nights: Metal, an amazing and terrifying thrill ride through the id of the DC Universe.

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A classic from the 1950’s! This coming of age story evokes a time long past, but presents never ending truths. A family read-along worthy of any bookshelf in any home. A great gift for a young reader, or for a grandparent to share with a grand child.

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“Unenenglished”? Something.

It’s a hoot, anyway. Give it a shot, unless you’re a strict prescriptivist.

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A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding.

Once every cycle, the great galactic civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Species far and wide compete in feats of song, dance and/or whatever facsimile of these can be performed by various creatures who may or may not possess, in the traditional sense, feet, mouths, larynxes, or faces. And if a new species should wish to be counted among the high and the mighty, if a new planet has produced some savage group of animals, machines, or algae that claim to be, against all odds, sentient? Well, then they will have to compete. And if they fail? Sudden extermination for their entire species.

Enjoy an excerpt of Catherynne M. Valente’s sparkling prose:

So where is everybody?

Many solutions have been proposed to soothe Mr. Fermi’s plaintive cry of transgalactic loneliness. One of the most popular is the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which whispers kindly: There, there, Enrico. Organic life is so complex that even the simplest algae require a vast array of extremely specific and unforgiving conditions to form up into the mostbasic recipe for primordial soup. It’s not all down to old stars and the rocks that love them. You’ve gotta get yourself a magnetosphere, a moon (but not too many), some gas giants to hold down the gravitational fort, a couple of Van Allen belts, a fat helping of meteors and glaciers and plate tectonics—and that’s without scraping up an atmosphere or nitrogenated soil or an ocean or three. It’s highly unlikely that each and every one of the million billion events that led to life here could ever occur again anywhere else. It’s all just happy coincidence, darling. Call it fate, if you’re feeling romantic. Call it luck. Call it God. Enjoy the coffee in Italy, the sausage in Chicago, and the day-old ham sandwiches at Los Alamos National Laboratory, because this is as good as high-end luxury multicellular living gets.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it’s colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong.