Lifestyle

How Margaret Mead's research into utopias helped usher in the psychedelic era

Published

2 years ago

January 16, 2024

Press Room

How Margaret Mead's research into utopias helped usher in the psychedelic era

American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead sits for an interview in 1952.

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American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead sits for an interview in 1952.

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Pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead came of age in a time of enormous change and uncertainty. In the aftermath of World War I, as technologies like the radio and automobile began to take hold, Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson began to formulate a vision for utopia that relied upon plant-based psychedelics.

“They saw science as something which was responsible for some of the bad things in the world,” historian Benjamin Breen says, “but also [as] something which could be a tool for fixing the world or healing a sick society.”

Breen is an associate professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz. He says Mead’s research began as an effort to understand the science of expanded consciousness and hypnosis. Her specific interest in psychedelics took hold in 1930 when, while doing fieldwork on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska, she noticed that people of the reservation were using peyote.

“Rather than seeing peyote use among the Omaha as something which predates the modern era and goes back to this ancient tradition, she came to see it as something which was modern,” Breen says. “And it allowed people — and not just the Omaha — but potentially people in the rest of the world, to cope with the rapid technological changes they were going through.”

'Reluctant Psychonaut' Michael Pollan Embraces The 'New Science' Of Psychedelics

During World War II, Mead and Bateson worked on a team that sought to use hypnosis and mind altering drugs in the fight against fascism. Later experiments went even further afield, with an effort to use LSD to teach dolphins how to talk.

In his new book, Tripping on Utopia, Breen writes about Mead and Bateson’s early scientific research into psychedelic substances — and how their research led to secret CIA experiments using psychedelics for interrogation.

Interview highlights

On the Cold War’s emphasis on altered states of consciousness and psychological warfare

Gregory Bateson, actually, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, writes a memo to the head of the OSS [the Office of Strategic Services] saying that unconventional means of warfare will predominate in the years to come. And so this idea of psychological warfare being more important than the warfare of conventional arms, that becomes really important in the Cold War. … The specter of LSD being released as a gas in a subway system, for instance, that, of course, never comes to pass. But the idea that there’s a war that can be expressed as a form of psychology, that we can fight battles through mass manipulation and through the media and through psychological techniques, I think that’s very, very important in the history of the Cold War — and even in the present. We’re living through it.

On Mead’s involvement with the “Macy Circle,” a group that conducted psychedelic research related to World War II

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

[The Macy Circle] grows out of this belief that scientists needed to directly intervene in the [World War II] effort, and specifically scientists who are studying consciousness, like anthropologists like Bateson and Mead, but also psychiatrists and psychologists. They tried to find ways that they could contribute. What this really looked like in practice was what came to be known as “psychological warfare.” Forms of propaganda, ways of understanding how altered states of consciousness could be used in the war. And this led to an interest in hypnosis. It led to an interest in what was called “truth drugs,” and it led to the very early psychedelic research in the United States.

Mead and Bateson are not conducting that research, but they’re crucial for bringing together this group of people from different fields and framing it in a way that allowed psychedelic science to flourish as a potential pathway toward benevolent treatments, treatments that were healing for society. But also — and this is the really fascinating thing about the Macy Circle — it also got the attention of intelligence organizations and the military. So by the early Cold War, by about 1952, the Macy Circle is being co-opted by the CIA — and that’s the beginning of what I see as this really important split in the history of psychedelics between the public branch and the secret branch.

On NASA-funded programs in the ’60s to teach dolphins to speak using LSD

The person at the center of this story is a guy named John C. Lilly, who Bateson, in about 1961, ends up writing to and they become friends. Lilly invites Gregory Bateson to join him at this dolphin research lab he’s set up with NASA funding and U.S. Navy funding in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and John C. Lilly is a physiologist, is a kind of early neuroscientist who’s really deeply committed to this idea that using things like computers and emerging scientific techniques, it should be possible to communicate not just with dolphins, but with whales as well, with cetaceans. …

And meanwhile, Lilly is injecting the dolphins with LSD and himself with LSD, and spending literally hours at a time trying to talk to them. And again, you can listen to these recordings. If you search online for the words John C. Lilly, dolphin, LSD, Stanford, you will find many, many tape recordings of this – and he doesn’t make much progress, suffice to say.

On Mead’s bisexuality

One of the really fascinating things about Margaret Mead that drew me into this whole book project was that she was also deeply secretive. It’s hard to convey just how secretive and private she really was. Her archive is enormous, and it seems like she’s an open book. But then when you dig into that archive, there’s all these little clues and hints that there’s other parts of her life that she’s concealing from virtually everyone. In fact, at one point she says, [anthropologist and lover] Ruth Benedict is the only person who really knew her.

[After Benedict’s death in 1948], from that point onwards, by Mead’s own account, she’s kind of a closed off person. She was open about her bisexuality with people close to her, but in the world of the ’40s and ’50s, to go public with that would have been not just career-ending, but potentially life-ruining. And she knew people this had happened to. It’s hard not to know people like that if you’re moving government circles, especially in the aftermath of World War II with the McCarthy era.

On Mead’s distinction between sexuality and gender, and seeing both in a spectrum

Early on, she’s truly radical and I think really deserves to be remembered as a pioneer in understanding specifically the division between gender and sexuality, which is now a widespread distinction that we make, but in the 30s, that was a very new idea that she helped develop.

On how the therapeutic use of psychedelics now is similar to the ’50s

To a striking extent, what we’re coming back to now in the 2020s looks a lot like what people like Gregory Bateson and the people he was working with in the 1950s were developing. So the idea is that you are in a comfortable environment, you’re listening to music you like … you’re with people you feel good around. It’s not like someone in a lab coat observing you, and you have a goal in mind. There’s an intentionality to the way psychedelic therapy is conducted today. You’re trying to solve some problem in your life or think through an issue. Those are all things that were developed in the 1950s. To an extent, they were things that got erased or largely forgotten by the more radical counter-cultural approach to LSD in the ’60s, where it becomes more of a recreational drug or imbued with mystical significance. I think a lot of what we’re seeing now with psychedelic therapy is actually a return to the older model.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Vowel Renewals

Published

11 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

Sunday Puzzle

NPR

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NPR

On air challenge

I’m going to give you some seven-letter words. For each one, change one consonant to a vowel to spell a new word.
Ex. CONCEPT –> CONCEIT

1. REVENGE

2. TRACTOR

3. PLASTIC

4. CAPTION

5. SCUFFLE

6. POMPOMS

7. MOBSTER

8. LINKAGE

9. TEMPERS

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name an animal. The first five letters of its name spell a place where you may find it. The last four letters of this animal will name another animal — but one that would ordinarily not be found in this place. What animals are these?

Challenge answer

Stallion —> Stall, Lion

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Peter Gordon, of Great Neck, N.Y. Name some tools used by shoemakers. After this word place part of a shoe. The result will be the subject of a famous painting. What is it?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Lifestyle

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

Published

12 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

The sun, played by Love Bailey, and the moon, played by Logan Wolfe.

He has been described as a magician and “being of light.” As Salvador Dalí’s kindred spirit and protégé. As the Andy Warhol of the West Coast. The artist Steven Arnold ought to be a household name. The exhibition “Cocktails in Heaven” at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica, which opened this week with a party co-hosted by Karen Hillenburg and Christine Messineo of Frieze, is a hopeful step in this direction.

On Monday night, the gallery transformed into a replica of Arnold’s legendary home and studio in Los Angeles, known as Zanzabar, which has been compared to Warhol’s Factory for the luminaries it attracted (Timothy Leary, Debbie Harry, Ellen Burstyn) and the creative synergy it inspired. Throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s, Zanzabar was host to queer gatherings and parties, as well as surrealist photoshoots with exquisite paper-cut set designs that Arnold entirely made from hand. “My house is a temple for me. It’s a religious space, it’s where the creativity happens,” he says in the 2019 documentary made on him, “Heavenly Bodies.” Arnold died at the age of 51 in 1994, from AIDS-related complications, and left behind a mind-bending body of work that is now housed by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Steven Arnold "Cocktails in Heaven" exhibition at Del Vaz Projects.

At Del Vaz, characters from Arnold’s ethereal photographs and films came to life in performances directed by artist Tyler Matthew Oyer: At the door, two French waiters, dressed in Mozart wigs and original coats hand-painted by Arnold, checked off guest names from an 8-foot scroll. Inside, performers dressed as the sun and moon — their mostly nude bodies spray-painted gold and silver — languorously laid over a banquet table abundant with crudités, conjuring a scene from Arnold’s most famous film, “Luminous Procuress,” which was projected on the wall. In the courtyard, a bodybuilder posed as a live version of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture. It was an ode to the joyous, maximalist world that Arnold meticulously and affectionately built in both life and art — because for him there was no distinction, art was life.

Steven Arnold, "Angel of Night," 1982, featuring model Juan Fernandez.

Steven Arnold, "Intersection of Dreams," 1985

Every detail of the party came from something found in Arnold’s archive. The artistic director of the exhibition, Orrin Whalen, planted a few of Arnold’s actual belongings in the warm room where his photographs and drawings hung: his ornate metal bracelet rested on a seashell, and replicas of his red leopard print business cards fanned open on the front table. “Cocktails in Heaven” is also the title of Arnold’s unpublished memoir and became the source material for the party’s chef, Gerardo Gonzalez, who scanned for passages where the artist mentioned his favorite foods — mainly hors d’oeuvres and copious glasses of Vermouth.

Guests on Monday included fashion and art world luminaries, including artists Ron Athey and Joey Terrill, designer Zana Bayne, former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, and jewelry designer Sophie Buhai, who mingled under the dangling grapevines and in a tent where upside-down paper umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. The dress code was “Complete Fantasy Conglomerata Divina Magnificata,” and the crowd did their part wearing feathered hats, leopard-print tops, golden sequinned dresses and polka-dotted face paint. It was only fitting to pay homage to Arnold this way, a fashion icon in his own right who was once voted the best dressed man of Los Angeles by L.A. Weekly.

The evening signaled that this is not the type of show that will deaden an artist behind glass vitrines. “We can summon artists’ spirits through gatherings,” says Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding director and chief curator of Del Vaz Projects, which is also Nayssan’s home. “This opening is an aspect of a project that should be equally important as the exhibition itself … Queer culture is carried not only through scholarship but through laughter, perfume, embrace and touch, through dinners and concerts — and whatever forms are waiting to be invented.”

Waseem Salahi, left, and Elisa Wouk Almino, Editor in chief of Image Magazine.

Actor Charlie Besso, left, and director Luke Gilford.

Lifestyle

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Published

23 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback.

Erin Simkin/HBO

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Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.

And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In The Comeback‘s original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission.

In this third season, she’s still out here hustling. Sure, she’s got an Emmy under her belt, and she’s been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband (Damian Young) have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager (Dan Bucatinsky) seems even more checked out than baseline. She’s hired a social media consultant (Ella Stiller) and has even started (ominous chord, shudder) … a podcast.

As we meet her, she’s older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She’s still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she’s craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It’s no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects, demands, even — to be heard.

She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie’s essential self: She’s still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a “right?” or a “yeah?” or a “y’know?,” because it’s a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she’ll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right?

But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classic The Comeback: She’s agreed to star as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway (after receiving assurances that her choreo will be the “dumbed down, Real Housewives version”). Rehearsal isn’t going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive (apart from one gay guy, whose words of praise Valerie seeks out like a homing missile — which checks out).

What happens next is quietly remarkable, given the Valerie Cherish we’ve come to love/cringe-in-sympathy-with over The Comeback‘s previous seasons. She doesn’t chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn’t try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they’re affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. (More accurately: She finds a ready, contractually viable excuse to quit — same difference, I’d argue.)

This isn’t the Valerie we used to know. When an opportunity to star in an AI-written sitcom arises, she doesn’t knock over furniture to lunge at the chance, as she would have before. She refuses (at first), she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved (they will, sort of), and she steps up as the show’s executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she’s the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.

There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That’s because Kudrow has altered Valerie’s fuel mixture a bit. She’s always been acutely self-aware, she’s always known when she’s being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people’s low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight.

Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it’s married to defiance, and to action.

She stands her ground against a costume designer (Benito Skinner) who sees her as camp and nothing more (yet another of The Comeback‘s knowing digs at its rabid gay fanbase). She agrees to play nice with a network executive (Andrew Scott) until she, very publicly, doesn’t. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it’s done.

But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show’s comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can’t quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show’s pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace real comedy writers, because comedy needs broken people. In another, a cast member from The Comeback‘s first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong.

On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is The Comeback. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we’ve just been exposed to the creators’ true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we’ve come to, well … cherish.

But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years’ time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there’ll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish’s swan song.

Which, as viewers of The Comeback’s definitive, beloved, iconic Season 1 finale will remember, is “I Will Survive.” Because it could never be anything else. Y’know?

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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