But while we can now begin to glimpse an end to the drug war, it is much harder to envision what the drug peace will look like. How will we fold these powerful substances into our society and our lives so as to minimize their risks and use them most constructively? The blunt binaries of “Just say no” that have held sway for so long have kept us from having this conversation and from appreciating how different one illicit drug is from another.
Large, healthy salmon leaping out of crystal-clear water is the kind of imagery the major fish farming companies in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, have worked hard to convey. But the glossy business brochures claiming the highest standards of quality, safety and sustainability do not hold up to scrutiny, according to renowned Australian author Richard Flanagan, whose latest book catalogs a trail of environmental destruction and problematic practices in the industry.
The two most revealing documents in this hefty collection of unpublished letters written by the novelist Shirley Jackson were never sent. One was addressed to her mother, and the other to her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Both were written not long before Jackson died in her sleep in 1965, at the age of 48. A third important but technically unsent letter included in this volume wouldn’t have even required postage: Jackson wrote it to herself, possibly sometime in 1963. “One world is writing and one is not,” she observed, “and from the one which is not, it is not possible to understand the one which is.”