Taking the scenic route through life. Formerly: PhD in the history of science
@Harvard
. Currently: Foraging in the woods and reading tarot in your dms 🏳️⚧️
I've read about LSD being given to just about any animal you can think of: snails, fish, dogs, cats, elephants, spiders, guinea pigs. I didn't think I could be surprised any more, but today I came across the delightful experiments of Heinz Lehmann, who gave LSD to dandelions.
I love how you can tell exactly which micro-clique each of these adults belonged to by their dance. I see you coke work-out princess, light new wave Talking Heads punk, Theatre dad, and shuffling goth mom
Apparently detransitioning is back in the news, so please enjoy this pic of a trans person living their best life without considering going back for a second.
@oldenoughtosay
And then when they finally do cancel your shifts all at once at the same time as the entire rest of the town, 1 million people are all trying to simultaneously leave in 24 hours, which is logistically impossible.
Seriously. Like…I will come to your office in private and explain it to you and no one ever has to know you asked. I know these things can be embarrassing. I am happy to be extremely discreet if you actually in good faith wish to know how to not harass your students.
Everyone and their dog keeps telling me to look into SSDI for my friends and I don’t know how to politely tell people that social services in the US are literally fucking impossible to actually get and largely exist in name only.
One time I was checking customers’ pockets at the drycleaners while they paid. I pulled a pair of panties out of the man’s pants. The woman saw and flipped out and started beating the shit out of him with her purse. THOSE AREN’T MINE, she was screaming. WHOSE PANTIES ARE THOSE?!
FOLKS WITH EXPERIENCE IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRY:
I wanna hear your personal horror stories with customers.
The worst, the scariest, the moments that still haunt you at random times of the day, I want it all.
Some folks think we’re exaggerating. Let’s show em how bad it can get.
What educational hot take will have you like this?
I think educating students almost solely with the skills needed to become either bureaucrats or techies is one of the most insidious forms of colonialism around, & white lefties seem almost entirely oblivious to this feature.
@PhilosophyMeToo
It really isn’t. Like the person in question kissed students on the lips, routinely commented on their appearance, and showered students with gifts and attention unequally. There’s absolutely zero mystery here.
@dandelionmama
I guess “I hope your ability to understand the details of this case are better than your ability to understand the details of an extremely unambiguous sentence, Your Honor” is out of the question?
Absolutely wild to watch people trashing food delivery on its face, a service which was around for decades before predatory companies like DoorDash gutted the industry and took it over. Did none of you who grew up in cities really never have a pizza delivered to your house?
I’ve been informed that I am not allowed to encourage this to randos on the internet. Only scientists with legal access to LSD and permission to do this should do this. Definitely no one else should give LSD to dandelions. Definitely not.
Yes. We battled like hell to get people to say partner in the 90s so that we could talk about our own relationships without having to mention gender. It was for our own safety because straight people like to ask about private relationships all. the. time.
What if you gave dandelions LSD in a single dose and then moved them to distilled water after they drank? What if you didn’t cut them but poured the LSD water on them in the ground? Can you mist it on them? I’m not encouraging anyone to do this and report back, but yes I am.
I’m going to lose my shit if one more person tells me to look into this. I’ve looked into it fifty fucking times and I do not have 40 hours a week to follow up with bureaucrats until I die, I need to make money, not get trapped into a complete time suck that produces nothing
Hi, I’m a Republican. I believe in small government staying out of people’s lives and the separation of church and state. That’s why I would like to report that today I signed eighteen new bills legislating how people should act in the privacy of their own homes.
And for people like “oh noes, we should’ve kept it to ourselves to telegraph safe spaces.”
Absolutely not. AIDS gave the queer community no choice but extreme publicity, which meant all those old secret codes became widely known. At that point safety means mainstreaming them.
First year grad students: oral histories are a uniquely perfect way to get unvarnished stories straight from the horse’s mouth without all the problematic horrors of archives
People on twitter: I remember way back when we had the lockdown. It was like 4, 5 years long. at least.
Apparently some “allies” are telling POC not to come to Harvard because it’s racist and I’m really wondering what non-racist wonderland they’re telling them to go to instead as they tell them to pass up this privilege that they themselves are taking advantage of.
Dandelions open and close in response to the sun (“dandelion clocks”). So they put them in drug-laced water and measured how much they opened. They closed sooner than normal with LSD. dextroamphetamine (aka dexedrine) made them stay awake longer.
One of the “perks” of being at Harvard is that sometimes you have to interact with famous academics that everyone fanboys over and you discover that they’re often self-important blowhards who treat others like shit, but you can’t really say that out loud without getting skewered
People aren’t paying enough attention to the ~combination~ of bills Florida is pushing through, e.g. dropping the unanimous jury requirement for the death penalty, extending the death penalty to child sexual battery, and criminalizing gender non-conformity in front of children
If you still want secret in group codes you have to make new ones. That is how history works. Words change their meaning and power as they travel into new contexts, and you cannot prevent them from traveling.
@girlziplocked
I once gave a ted-talk like presentation to funders trying to get a project off the ground. The pres was great but I flopped horrendously in the mingle session afterwards when I couldn’t play nice with a woman panicked because her family might lose one of 5 vacation homes
For any curiosity seekers:
H. E. Lehmann, et al. "The Effects of Psychotropic Drugs on Biological Systems of Low Complexity," in Research Approaches to Psychiatric Problems: A Symposium, edited by Tourlentes, Pollack, and Himwich (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1962): 44-73.
I feel like the world needs to know that Cambridge has roving gangs of wild turkeys and sometimes they chase terrified Harvard students. I need y’all to have this mental image.
@bayesianboy
I....what? It's a longstanding known problem that letters of rec for women consistently do not emphasize their minds and instead emphasize how nice, collegial, and kind they are and letters for men focus on how brilliant they are. Where the hell are you getting this rant from??
When I was 15 my mom was telling me about how her roommate used to bring random guys home & one day she brought home a cute actor named Bobby passing through town with a theatre company. A few years later my mom saw his name on a movie screen in Alaska. The movie was Mean Streets
My dad once flew on Concorde. "The flight was delayed so that fellow you like played some songs on his guitar. Paul someone. It was awful."
Yes my dad attended an impromptu live acoustic session by Paul McCartney in an airport lounge. And he hated it.
When you travel to an archive and the government shuts down so it’s closed, and you just figure out some different fucking archive because you paid to be here, and someone asks you about the important methodological choices that go into choosing archives and you just look at them
Cleaning with ADD is like: wash dishes, oh the stove, oh shit the dishes, I should clear the counter by bottling bitters…3 hours later…wait the dishes, but wait sweeping
PSA on pronoun sharing:
You should never REQUIRE your students or colleagues to share pronouns. Not everyone is out. If you require this you may be putting your students in danger, or simply in an uncomfortable position.
I’m sorry, have I been ranting at the world for the last week? MAYBE THIS IS WHY, PLEASE STOP EXPECTING ME TO WASTE TIME I DO NOT HAVE ON USELESS THINGS
HR departments, I am fucking BEGGING YOU not to put “desired salary” as a required form entry when you REFUSE to even hint at the salary range in any public materials. Absolutely scummy af and starts out our potential working relationship very much on the wrong foot.
Today is the day of my birth!
It is also 5 years since I decided to transition!
It is my birthday! It is my tranniversary! It is Pride!
I’m going to be painting Baltimore purple for the day, but if anyone wants to make this an awesome birthday/Pride/tranniversary week (cont)
A bunch of ex Mormons accidentally followed me cuz they thought I was studying the history of LDS and now I know things like what a GA is and which ones are betraying assholes and I feel like honestly? everyone could use a little more LSD in their lives and a little less LDS.
Anyway, that is not the scariest experience (that would be a man trying to rip the door off the hinges and threatening to kill us because we had closed for the night), but it is the one I think about the most.
Interviewer: ok, but you’re at Harvard, surely you want a high-powered, research position publishing in top journals
Me, looking at my twitter mutuals posting about the history of pirates, toilets, witchcraft, and dirt: I think you misunderstand my reason for being in academia
Explosion at Northeastern. MIT is telling students to avoid unknown packages and Harvard is just telling everyone about a vague “incident.”
We really live in a fucking shit ass timeline.
Oh heyyyyyy just brought back memories of the time a very bougie looking tween girl came to us at the concession stand of the dollar movie theatre to inform us she’d “made a small mess in the bathroom” and we went to look and she had pooped over every square inch of the stall.
And with that, my inaugural trip to Mormonville is now complete. please enjoy this gratuitous photo of me with Sphinx Joseph Smith, because of course this exists
Reminded today of Go Ask Alice, a hoax memoir about a teenage acidhead that was actually written by a wayward Mormon housewife. Pleased to say this research project continues to be the gift that just keeps giving.
The dating disconnect actually explained:
Straight people have atrocious communication skills, struggle to grasp that people have different interests and desires that are valid, actively disrespect those differences, and legitimately seem to hate the opposite sex.
The dating disconnect, explained:
The percentage of men who are 25-45, over 6’ tall, make > $100,000, and can run a sub 8 minute mile.
~ 0.01%
Percentage of women over 150 pounds with a sub 600 credit score who expect to find a man who is 25-45, over 6’ tall, makes >
@iproposethis
@bonitasmith
@MehrsaBaradaran
@Big_Unit35
I teach a lot of first gen kids at Harvard. It’s hard for them and they have to deal with things other students don’t, but they work their asses off and the improvement you see just from the start to the end of a semester is astronomical.
Once taught a history of science class where we looked at the history of anesthesia and how it created the practice of modern surgery. I know you’ll be really shocked to hear this, but before the era of painkillers, people didn’t go to doctors very much…
Twitter: Beyoncé’s accent is FAKE, she’s sTeAlINg OuR CuLTurE
Me, a Texan who literally went to the same middle school as Beyoncé & has never been accused of stealing country music despite it being an amalgamation of Indigenous, Black, Mexican, Spanish, Cajun, & Irish music: 🫠
I need to rant for just a minute about how utterly fucked it is when people underestimate the amount of knowledge/skill / work that goes into “basic” tasks. It isn’t merely classist, tacky, insulting, or poor form. It’s actively dangerous. You are putting people in danger.
Americans’ Puritanical instinct to call anything “luxurious” that is not immediately necessary to the barest, most abjectly miserable ekeing out of an existence is the at the affective core of why we continue to have zero social safety net or social goods.
That’s the same job where we had to escort an extremely inebriated homeless man out of the theater for repeatedly screaming I WANT TO LICK MICHELLE PFEIFFER’S WET PU$$Y at the screen for a good 5 minutes before someone finally came to ask us to kick him out lmao
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we respond to perceived weakness — disability, most obviously, but also things ranging from financial struggles to victimhood to even the littlest thing like an acknowledgement that’s someone doesn’t know something. 🧵
Can twitter amp me up for the next two days? I have to finish the last 20-30pp of my full dissertation draft by the end of Thursday and I could use a little cheering squad.
I haven’t said anything about
@krisis86
passing because I didn’t know them well and it doesn’t seem my place, as someone whose interaction with the Mormon queer community is accidental and as an outsider. But I wish more people outside that circle understood …
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) grants breakthrough therapy status to LSD formula to treat generalized anxiety disorder after initial study shows that a single dose of the drug could provide lasting relief
Every year some white 20-something year old kid dies eating rice that’s been sitting on his counter for 11 days, and I think a lot about a culture that would raise boys to be so incompetently helpless that they can’t even feed themselves.
@jewstein3000
@valleyctrca
I prefer women of color myself. They tend to actually listen to the patient and are less likely to be sanctimoniously convinced the patient is an idiot or a liar, which means they have done the necessary steps required to administer care.
Since everyone is on a tear about convenient and affordable food options, I’m just gonna take this opportunity to say it’s time to bring back real street food vendors that aren’t just overpriced hipster caviar on artisanal avocado toast.
@blkgirllostkeys
My father disowned me and I was homeless for a year and had to pay for my entire education myself because he said me not doing the dishes enough was disrespectful.
I had to find a different modality later that sees cleaning as a form of ritual magic for self care & mental health
Hey there! LSD researcher here. A big reason you don’t read about autistic kids in school back in the 50s and 60s is not because they didn’t exist. It’s that they were often institutionalized and doctors like Lauretta Bender shot them full of drugs like LSD to try and cure them.
I just read a thread of older people saying when they were at school nobody transitioned gender, and nobody was diagnosed as autistic. Both have of course become much more prevalent today. What was fascinating was that not one of them mentioned that nobody came out as gay either.
I just picked up a home covid test before meeting my cousin for the day and the cashier had the nerve to look freaked out. Really? I hate to break it to you, ma’am, but I am not the one without a mask in this situation.
@KaylaAncrum
The Secret of NIMH was a critique of government science, which was a huge topic in the 70s after everything came out about the CIA experimenting on citizens. The rats were escapees from the labs of the National Institute of Mental Health, which is a real institution!