What the fuck is this,” asks Jeffrey, so high that he cannot see straight, his face a melting candle. By “this” I don’t think he means the chemicals he’s ingested, which he’s taken on prior occasions, albeit at lower doses. Nor do I take him to mean Nana’s Living Room, the interactive art piece where beautiful people in costume are draped over pillows and rugs and whispering to one another in soft Californian, as the older woman we call Nana rocks rhythmically in her chair, passing out candies.

No, by “this” I suspect Jeffrey means the whole mandala, the ineffable shitshow unfolding on the grounds of a dilapidated hotel in Northern California that some 700 of us have commandeered for a weekend of psychedelic art, theater, music, and hijinks. It’s one of a handful of secret parties thrown each year by an event production company I cannot name. The parties, let’s call them Clambakes, have earned a reputation as some of the most insane and creative in the Bay Area’s thriving psychedelic underground. Clambakes last anywhere from a single night to four days, and have taken place at museums, hotels, theaters, mansions, and warehouses. The crown jewel goes down each summer in a hidden valley in the Northern California woods. …

LOVE/HATE

The nicotine is everywhere, and I am assailed on all sides. Hip Catalan separatists in jean cutoffs smoking their rollies, their tobacco laughter echoing up the cracked façades of this narrow Barcelona street and into my open window. The old lady in the apartment across the street from mine hanging up sopping clothes on the strung wires, a cigarette dangling from her lips, her morning routine occasionally interrupted when her body seizes and her rheumy coughs ring out. The construction workers grunting in my building’s hallway, the smoke from their cigarettes creeping under my door and rising in tantalizing curls.

I am biting my fingernails, one eye on the blood forming in my thumb’s crease, the other on the timer on my smartphone. I compulsively bounce my leg as three pieces of nicotine gum congeal into a tumored mass inside my mouth. I focus on my breathing. I recite a mantra. …

Future Human

Max Hawkins will be getting his first tattoo in a few days, and the panic’s setting in. Not because it’s a permanent choice — although it certainly is. And not because of the pain — he thinks that’ll be manageable enough. Hawkins is panicking because until the moment he walks into the parlor, he won’t have any idea what tattoo he’s getting, or where on his body he’s getting it.

The random tattoo generator he’s built searches Google Images’ line drawings, taking a sample of the Internet’s offerings by choosing keywords in proportion to how frequency they’re used. By pressing a button, he is offered up a random image for a random part of his body. He’s been testing the generator, and it works. …

All the familiar paranoias emerge on a bright summer day in Big Sur, as my older brother and I watch my 70-year-old father come up on LSD for the first time in…maybe ever? His eyes are closed, hands folded on his lap. The light shines through gaps in the redwoods and lands in dapples on his face.

What have we done?

Here is a man who has fought in wars, who was once institutionalized by the Egyptian military, who had a heart attack at 54. A man beloved back home in Egypt, where he is an actor and humanitarian. A man who is a devout Muslim with unshakable faith in the world as he sees it. A man with people who depend on him for their livelihoods. …

William Mellon Hitchcock was not your typical acid head.

Billy, as he was called, was a tall, charming blonde stockbroker in his twenties who worked at Lehman Brothers, for one. He was heir to one of the largest fortunes in the country, for another. And he had a trust fund that lined his pockets with $15,000 a week to do what he pleased. Sometimes he played the stocks. Sometimes he dropped acid. …

From the preacher warning that the day of reckoning is nigh, to the sports analyst prognosticating about the outcome of next week’s big game, to the fortune teller calling for hard times in Mercury retrograde, predictions are pervasive, but accountability is rare. That the vast majority of predictions fail to come true is hardly a deterrent; we tend to remember the few that do.

This is a story about a prediction that was made ten years ago, on the eve of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, by Warren Buffett, one of the three richest people in the world. Unlike most predictions, Buffett’s came to pass. …

On July 25, 01585, near the end of a century of unprecedented change, four Japanese boys stopped in Milan on their way back home to Japan. They’d been sent as the first Japanese Embassy to Europe three years earlier by the Jesuit missionary Alesandro Valignano. Their European tour took them through Spain, where they met King Philip II, and to Rome, where they met with the Pope. Now, in Milan, they encountered Urbano Monte, a gentleman scholar from a wealthy Milanese family whose interests had lately turned to geography. …

Before Xavier Dphrepaulezz became Fantastic Negrito, the Oakland musician who won two Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues Album in the past three years, he was, for a brief period in 2012, my weed dealer.

Every week or so, he’d stop by my Berkeley apartment in an old car with a car seat in the back to deliver eighths that made my shifts as a barista more bearable. I’d always hated the awkward small talk that accompanied these sorts of encounters, the feigned attempts that the exchange was anything but transactional. But it was different with Dphrepaulezz. …