Ethel the Blog has been watching these stories recently:

insights from J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the
Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World;

a remembrance of Harvard’s renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes; I’m only just learning of, and diminished by, his death on April 10 at the age of 86. Schultes, from whom I was privileged to take a seminar as an undergraduate (he gave the class at 6:00 a.m., as I recall, to screen out the frivolous and undisciplined [yes, I attended every meeting]), was the mentor of Wade Davis, Marc Plotkin and (Ethel fails to note) Andrew Weil, and arguably one of the West’s experts on indigenous mind-altering and medicinal plant use in the Amazon. He was a swashbuckling Indiana Jones figure who “went native” with indigenous peoples in search of their botanical knowledge and a conservationist raising the hue and cry about the preservation of the rainforests decades before it was fashionable. From the New York Times’ obituary:

Dr. Schultes’s research into plants that produced hallucinogens like peyote and
ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among youthful drug
experimenters in the 1960’s. His findings also influenced cultural icons like Aldous
Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered
hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery.

Dr. Schultes disdained these self- appointed prophets of an inner reality. He
scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the 1960’s who also taught
at Harvard, for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled
the Latin names of the plants.

According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Burroughs once
described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Dr.
Schultes’s response was, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”

coverage of James Bamford’s claim, in his new book Body of Secrets about the National Security Agency [it’s on my list…] , that the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, fatal for 34 American sailors, was not as Israel has always claimed an accident, but carried out for counterintelligence purposes;

Orrin Hatch’s pivotal and hypocritical role in the brewing storm over Shrub’s judicial appointments; and

an interesting, head-turning followup to the Lockerbie trial suggesting it may not have been the Libyans after all who were responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.