March 25, 2003
Pranas Ancevicius, my maternal grandfather, was intercepted by the German navy while trying to escape the Baltics for Sweden in 1944. An anti-Stalinist intellectual, Pranas had sensed the impending return of the Red Army to his native Lithuania. Caught between two loathsome regimes, he made his way to Nazi Berlin, where he hid with his family under cover of the right combination of documents. (more…)
February 2003
In 1995 Jeremy Narby dropped une bombe with the publication of Le Serpent Cosmique. Available in English as The Cosmic Serpent since 1998, it is the story of an academic investigation that became an astral awakening. A Stanford-trained anthropologist, Narby had been working with indigenous people in the Amazon in the 1980s when, curious about the source of their sophisticated ecological knowledge, he took part in an ayahuasca ceremony. (more…)
September 7, 2002
When disaster struck on Sept. 11, 2001, we did what people always do in times of crisis: We reached out to loved ones and others in our communities for reassurance, for news, for dialog. But this was the first national catastrophe to occur in the Information Age, in a world wired for a radical new information-exchanging technology called e-mail. Over the ensuing days, we realized that by responding to these events via e-mail, we were participating in a vital new arena of the national discourse — and that this discourse was recorded, at least for the moment, inside our computers. To preserve this fleeting record of our collective experiences and reactions, Gregory Dicum and Bryan Bell put out a call for people to send them the e-mails from this intense period that had the most personal significance for them. The following are a selection of excerpts from the e-mails they collected, as well as from the e-mail dialog they engaged in themselves.
