Yale University Press

• Chosen by a jury of international journalists, practitioners and scholars, the Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the best book on international affairs published in English.
• Homelands: A personal history of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash (Yale University Press)
  Timothy Garton Ash, Europe's "historian of the present," has been "breathing Europe" for the last half century.
• The Lionel Gelber Prize was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
• The award is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

• NEW HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On Wednesday night, Ned Blackhawk won the National Book Award in nonfiction for his groundbreaking history The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History .
• Hundreds attended the 74th National Book Awards in New York City, raising more than $1 million for the National Book Foundation, which oversees the event and provides a wide range of public and educational programs.
• Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America.
• He is author or co-editor of three other books in Native American and Indigenous history.

• NEW HAVEN, Conn., Sept. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Book Foundation has announced its longlists for the 2023 National Book Awards, tapping The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History , by Ned Blackhawk, for its nonfiction longlist.
• Ned Blackhawk is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he serves as faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America.
• The finalists for the 2023 National Book Awards will be named on October 3, 2023.
• The winners of the 2023 National Book Awards will be announced live at the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 15, 2023, in New York City.

• Whether seeing the world through the eyes of a toad is an experience worth having is an open question.
• Toad juice (or bufotenine, its active ingredient) is currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit usually in smokable form.
• Mike Tyson, Hunter Biden and Joe Rogan credit it with life-changing insights that years of amphibian-free therapy could not provide.
• Review: Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind – Mike Jay (Yale University Press) Psychedelics are back in the news.

The early psychonauts

• Jay excavates a much deeper and more interesting history of early chemical adventurers.
• In the 1880s, for example, Sigmund Freud self-administered cocaine to test whether it could induce euphoria and recharge the cerebral battery as earlier psychonauts had suggested.
• Chastened by his colleague’s descent into a vortex of abuse, he set cocaine aside and airbrushed it from his life story.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: peyotes in suburbia – the secret world of Sydney's psychoactive cacti growers

Substances and society

• Much of Jay’s book lays out an absorbing history of psychoactive substances, but it is also rich with insights on the broader societal implications of substance use.
• Once an expansive category, it contracted when “medications” escaped into therapeutic legitimacy, leaving the remaining substances stigmatised and criminalised.
• More recently, psychedelics have attempted the same manoeuvre, trying to shed the taint of abused drugs to become seen as morally impeccable.
• Psychedelics have been stereotypically whiter than the substances against which the American war on drugs has primarily been fought, disproportionately targeting minority communities as a result.

Psychonautics and psychology

• Many early psychonauts were artists, writers and philosophers, but influential psychologists and neurologists were also well represented, notably Freud, James and, decades later, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, a buttoned-down academic researcher before he turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
• These three writers all found inspiration in their experiences of intoxication, although Freud backed away from his own.
• Their explorations were supported by approaches to psychology that centred the study of subjectivity.
• William James worked at a time when subjective experience was central to the nascent field of academic psychology.
• New psychoactive substances – such as amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD – were synthesised during this period, but the tradition of self-experimentation had died within psychology.