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Here’s The Ultimate Scientifically-Determined Playlist For When You’re Tripping On Mushrooms (And It Features Classical Music!)

Research psychologist Bill Richards, who works on clinical studies at Johns Hopkins in which patients are given psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression or anxiety or as an aid in quitting smoking, assembled the list, and he avoided trance and techno: “Orchestral music is less distracting and less likely to give room for a person to fall back on normal patterns of thinking.”

Musician Pulled Over For A Traffic Stop Loses His Life Savings

Civil forfeiture allows law enforcement to take and keep cash, cars and other property without ever charging someone with a crime. Before that fateful March day, Phil had never heard of civil forfeiture. He was just a musician driving through Wyoming to a show in Salt Lake City. Phil had big plans for his life savings, which he brought with him for safekeeping.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters To His Children As Father Christmas

“In December 1920 Father Christmas wrote a letter to a modest house in the Oxford suburbs, enclosing a watercolour sketch of his own rather more exotic domed snow house, approached by a flight of steps lit by ice lanterns. ‘I heard you ask Daddy what I was like and where I lived,’ he wrote to three-year-old John Tolkien, and as the family grew to four children, he continued to write every Christmas for 23 years, until the youngest, Priscilla, was 14.”

Actors Union Does The Math: New Tax Bill Will Increase Taxes For Working Actors, Writers, Reduce Them For Big Stars

“Some working actors would see their taxes almost quadruple, according to an analysis by the stage actors union Actors’ Equity. The new bill appears to be regressive: the poor suffer the worst increases, the middle-class gets hit hard, and the wealthy benefit from tax cuts. The same effect will hit writers, directors and screen and television actors. Producers could be affected too, as well as below-the-line workers with agents or other significant business expenses.”

The Best Of The Best Books Of The Year Lists For 2017

Melville House helpfully offers a guide to which of the far-too-many lists are worth paying attention to – among them, The Best List That’s Interactive and Lets You Play With Filters to Figure Out What to Read Next, Best List That’s Chosen by Actual Readers and Not Critics, Best List That We’re Partial to Because There’s a Melville House Book On It, and Best List that Features a Book About Sharks.

Purcell’s ‘Dido And Aeneas’ – The More We Learn About It, The Less We Know

Musicologist Ellen T. Harris wrote an authoritative book on this opera three decades ago – a book she has had to completely revise and reissue based on all the info scholars have uncovered over those years. Yet “we know even less [now] than we did then, or at least less than we had imagined. We can no longer say with certainty in what year the opera was written, where it had its premiere, who performed it or even what the original score contained.” In this essay for the Times, Harris explains what it turns out that we’d wrongly assumed and what we’ve learned that upended those assumptions.