Inside the Bay Area’s craziest secret underground parties — 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…

I’d never considered a future where a pod was out of reach. Moving to Barcelona changed that. — 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…

This software engineer let an algorithm pick where he lives, what he does—even what tattoo to get. Is he onto something? — 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. …

The Arab Spring brought my father back to America, and LSD helped us make up for lost time — 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. …

Owned by one of America’s richest families, Millbrook hosted Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Mingus and more — 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…

Buffett’s wager is a lesson in taking the Long View — 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. …

Urbano Monte’s planisphere was centuries ahead of its time — 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…

Xavier Dphrepaulezz’s triumph is the feel-good story we need to hear — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. 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…

The art of Alicia Eggert makes time tangible — I. Time The most commonly-used noun in the English language is, according to the Oxford English Corpus, time. Its frequency is partly due to its multiplicity of meanings, and partly due to its use in common phrases. …