Michael Pollan - "This Is Your Mind on Plants" - Davia Nelson
Michael Pollan will discuss This Is Your Mind on Plants. He will be joined in conversation by Davia Nelson.
Virtual event
Presented in partnership with Penguin Random House
Purchase tickets here
About the book: Of all the things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular 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.
About the author: Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
About the interlocutor: Davia Nelson is half of the NPR producing team, The Kitchen Sisters, producers of the du-Pont Columbia and James Beard Award-winning series Hidden Kitchens heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and two Peabody Award-winning NPR series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. Their Webby Award-winning podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present… is part of Radiotopia from PRX. Their current NPR/PRX series is The Keepers — stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators and historians — keepers of the culture and the cultures they keep.
Related Titles
About the book: Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular 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.
About the author: Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
About the interlocutor: Davia Nelson is half of the NPR producing team, The Kitchen Sisters, producers of the du-Pont Columbia and James Beard Award-winning series Hidden Kitchens heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and two Peabody Award-winning NPR series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. Their Webby Award-winning podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present… is part of Radiotopia from PRX. Their current NPR/PRX series is The Keepers — stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators and historians — keepers of the culture and the cultures they keep.
- Tickets include access to the virtual event and a copy of This Is Your Mind on Plants. Shipping is not included but can be added at the checkout.
- The event will be livestreamed on July 15 at 7pm CT.
- Registered guests will receive a link to access the program via email on the day of the event at the email address you used to make your purchase.
- If you have questions about Seminary Co-op book fulfillment, please email onlineorders@semcoop.com
- Books will be shipped to registered guests around the date of publication. Please be patient as you may be affected by general shipping delays occurring nationwide. Orders will be fulfilled 7-10 business days from date of publication or date of purchase (if after date of publication).