Mike Jay | The New York Review of Books

Mike Jay

Mike Jay’s books include Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond, and Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. His most recent book, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, was published in paperback in April. (May 2024)

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Ecstasy’s Odyssey

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to “a low-calorie martini.”

I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World

by Rachel Nuwer

The History of MDMA

by Torsten Passie in collaboration with Udo Benzenhöfer, translated from the German by Andrew Dennis

May 23, 2024 issue

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.

Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide

edited by Joanna Ebenstein

December 8, 2022 issue