Month: September 2020

Medicinal Plants: Interview with Dr. Jordan Sloshower

Medicinal Plants: Interview with Dr. Jordan Sloshower

In this episode, Kelsie interviews Dr. Jordan Sloshower, a psychiatrist and researcher at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Sloshower co-founded the Yale Psychedelic Science Group and is currently an investigator and therapist in two clinical trials of psilocybin-assisted therapy in the treatment of major depressive disorder and a clinical trial for the use of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD. In this interview, Dr. Sloshower discusses his work, the intricacies of setting up these clinical trials, and the ethnohistory of botanical psychedelics.

Ep. 35 – J. Drew Lanham on finding ourselves magnified in nature’s colored hues

Ep. 35 – J. Drew Lanham on finding ourselves magnified in nature’s colored hues

As Dr. Joseph Drew Lanham writes in his beautiful and deeply moving memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, from his earliest days growing up in the piedmont forests and fields of Edgefield, South Carolina, he dreamed of flight. This fascination with the aerial journeys of the blue jays that stole his grandmother’s pecans and the crows that invaded his father’s cornfield sparked Dr. Lanham’s lifelong dedication to studying birds and to exploring what it means to be a “rare bird” himself: a Black man in a field that is overwhelmingly white and an ecologist finding freedom through wildness on land where his ancestors were enslaved. In addition to advancing scientific understanding of wild animals, Dr. Lanham has written extensively about the deep and often overlooked connections between how we treat nature and how we treat our fellow humans. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Lanham about how bird lives and Black lives intertwine in the story of the Carolina Parakeet, the language-defying joy of watching swallow-tailed kites, and why Emily Dickinson was right in declaring that “hope is the thing with feathers.”