Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Program That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Control (1953–1973)

in History | August 17th, 2021

If the CIA ever wants to change its motto to something hip and trendy that the kids’ll like, may I suggest “f*ck around and find out”? Because in this above mini-doc on the secret LSD mind-control experiments known as MK-Ultra (1953–1973), they were certainly doing a lot of the former, and then they took a lot of the latter and sent it down the old memory hole.

Could the Soviets be developing mind-control programs? The CIA, as several of these accounts tell us, became convinced they were. However, it’s never specified why they were convinced. Could it be a bit of guilt for hiring some ex-Nazi (and/or Nazi supporting) German scientists through Operation Paperclip? Or was this all just a cover because the CIA really wanted to experiment with mind control? I mean, it’s 70 years later, you can admit it. There were all these new drugs being developed that altered the mind, so why not start there?

Top among the cornucopia of pharmacologica was lysergic acid diethylamide, and the man who knew LSD the best was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the “Poisoner in Chief” as his biographer Stephen Kinzer calls him. (See his book: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.) Raised in the Bronx, Gottlieb’s love of chemistry and science earned him a prestigious place at CalTech. By the end of the 1940s he had been recruited by the CIA.

Gottlieb’s paradox was his love of LSD. He took it more than 200 times. He tended towards Buddhism, not surprising for those whose mind has been expanded by psychedelics. And he lived like a proto-hippie, growing his own vegetables and living “off the grid” for a while with his family. Yet at the same time, he had no problems with absolute devilish behavior. Once he convinced the CIA to buy up the world’s supply of LSD, he set to work. He’d dose colleagues with massive amounts and only tell them afterwards. He’d conduct experiments on sex workers, prisoners, or people with terminal illness. Many didn’t know what they were signing up for. The LSD in heavy doses were meant to annihilate the mind, and allow a new mind to be put in place. That didn’t work out that well, but Gottlieb and associates kept trying, under the aegis of then-CIA director Allen Dulles and Chief of Operations Richard Helms. In reality, Dulles and others high up in the CIA had a hands-off approach. Better not to know what Gottlieb was up to, especially when it went against the Nuremberg Code of experimenting on people against their will–the very things the Nazis did.

There were many victims too, corpses that were the cost of doing business in the Cold War, and so many we will not know about. The highest profile death—and what pulled MK-Ultra out of obscurity—was government scientist Frank Olsen. His jump from a NYC hotel room was ruled a suicide by the government, a result of work stress. (The whole Olsen affair forms the backbone of Errol Morris’ 2017 documentary series Wormwood.) The uncovering of the truth helped expose the history of MK-Ultra to a mid-‘70s America that had lost faith in its government and was ripe for conspiracy theories to take hold.

Yes, MK-Ultra was an actual thing. But because Gottlieb and his bosses had destroyed most of the records, conspiracy theories filled in the gaps. Were Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan MK-Ultra experiments gone wrong? What about Charles Manson, who author Tim O’Neill discovered was a “lab rat” for CIA experiments? Mobster Whitey Bulger was part of a LSD experiment and the FBI let him continue to commit crimes. The future Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had taken part in “brutal” psychological experiments while at Harvard.

On the other hand, the MK-Ultra experiments also affected culture in a good way. Allen Ginsberg tried his first dose in Northern California, as did Ken Kesey, who came out of it a proponent of LSD and formed the nascent hippie movement.

Gottlieb retired in 1972, and MK-Ultra’s results were lacking in any practical results. In 1999, Gottlieb passed away from unknown causes. Possibly a heart attack…but who knows, right?

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Animated

Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a “Creativity Pill”

When Michel Foucault Tripped on Acid in Death Valley and Called It “The Greatest Experience of My Life” (1975)

Ken Kesey Talks About the Meaning of the Acid Tests

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Listen to Plato Invent the Myth of Atlantis (360 B.C)

in History, Philosophy | August 17th, 2021

Myths emerge from the murky depths of human prehistory, leaving their sources shrouded in mystery. But on rare occasions, we can trace them to a single point of origin. The myth of Atlantis, for example, the ancient civilization that supposedly sank into the sea, has one and only one source — Plato — who told the story in both the Timaeus and Critias, sometime around 360 BC, as an allegory for corruption and civilizational decay.

Plato puts the tale of Atlantis nesos, the “island of Atlas,” in the mouth of the aged Critias, a character in both dialogues, who says he heard the story second-hand from Solon — “not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets” — who in turn brought it from Egypt, where he supposedly heard it from a priest in a city called Sais.

As you can hear in the dialogue that bears his name, read above in the Voices of the Past video, Critias gives a lengthy description of the island’s size (in Timaeus it is “larger than Libya and Asia put together”), its location (“the Pillars of Heracles”), and its geography, cities, peoples, and so forth. In Timaeus, Socrates declares that this tale (unlike his imaginary republics) “has the very great advantage of being fact not fiction.”

But there was never such a place in the ancient world. While islands have disappeared after earthquakes or volcanoes, “I don’t think there’s any question,” says geologist Patrick Nunn, “that the story of Atlantis is a myth.” Plato made up the lost civilization and formidable rival to Athens, who soundly defeated the Atlanteans, as a dramatic foil. “It’s a story that captures the imagination,” says Bard College professor of classics James Romm. Its purpose is illustrative, not historical.

[Plato] was dealing with a number of issues, themes that run throughout his work. His ideas about divine versus human nature, ideal societies, the gradual corruption of human society — these ideas are all found in many of his works. Atlantis was a different vehicle to get at some of his favorite themes.

Why has there been so much desire to find Plato’s account credible? Early modern European readers of Plato like Francis Bacon and Thomas More — authors of The New Atlantis and Utopia, respectively — treated Atlantis as philosophical allegory, a fiction like their own invented societies. But later interpreters believed it, from amateur scholars to colonial adventurers, explorers, and treasure hunters. Atlantis, wherever it is, some thought, must be full of sunken gold.

National Geographic quotes Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany, who says, “Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there. Every place you can imagine.” Yet whatever similarities it may have had to a real place, Plato’s yarn was strictly parable: Its inhabitants were once divine. “Sired and ruled over by Poseidon, and thus half-gods and half-mortals,” writes Aeon, they “despised everything but virtue.”

But Atlantis grew corrupt in time, Critias tells us, “when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.”

Ancient Philosophy: Free Online Course from the University of Pennsylvania

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Pompeii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesuvius

in Architecture, History | August 16th, 2021

We can’t regard the ruins of Pompeii, however unusually well-preserved they are, without trying to imagine what the place looked like before 79 AD. It was in that year, of course, that Mount Vesuvius erupted, entombing the ancient Roman city in ash and pumice. The exhumed Pompeii has taught modern humanity a great deal about first-century urban planning as practiced by the Roman Empire. But it’s one thing to walk the paths Pompeiians walked, and quite another to see the built environment that they must have seen. The latter experience is available in the eighteen-minute video above, which uses computer graphics to create a tour of a rebuilt Pompeii.

This production, in fact, provides views of Pompeii that Pompeiians themselves could never have seen, including drone-like flights along its streets and around its famous structures like the Temple of Apollo, the Basilica, and the Forum. But even more than its grand public buildings, the city’s private dwellings — many of them grand in their own way — have influenced the way we’ve built in recent centuries.

“With their unmistakable style, they have inspired architects of all times,” says the video’s narrator. Even as urbanization reduced the size of Pompeiian houses, they gained “richness in decorations,” reflecting the sensibility of the local culture.

“Temples, basilicas, spas, houses, and a refined, high-level lifestyle make Pompeii one of the most famous cities of the Roman Empire of the first century,” says the narrator. “All of this, however, is about to end abruptly.” We all know what happened next, but the extent of the destruction wrought by Mount Vesuvius takes a vivid form in the video just above, which compares its own CGI reconstructions of these same buildings to the ruins of today. In its time, Pompeii’s refinement made it a well-known city, and something of a showcase of Roman civilization. But nearly two millennia after its destruction, it has become much more famous as a symbol of civilization itself: its surprising continuity, but also its deceptive fragility.

How the Survivors of Pompeii Escaped Mount Vesuvius’ Deadly Eruption: A TED-Ed Animation Tells the Story

See the Expansive Ruins of Pompeii Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

High-Resolution Walking Tours of Italy’s Most Historic Places: The Colosseum, Pompeii, St. Peter’s Basilica & More

Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pompeii

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take a Trip to the LSD Museum, the Largest Collection of “Blotter Art” in the World

in Art, Chemistry, History, Museums, Random | August 16th, 2021

When Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters kicked off Haight-Ashbury’s counterculture in the 1960s, LSD was the key ingredient in their potent mix of drugs, the Hell’s Angels, the Beat poets, and their local band The Warlocks (soon to become The Grateful Dead). Kesey administered the drug in “Acid Tests” to find out who could handle it (and who couldn’t) after he stole the substance from Army doctors, who themselves administered it as part of the CIA’s MKUltra experiments. Not long afterward, Grateful Dead soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley synthesized “the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street,” writes Rolling Stone, and became the country’s biggest supplier, the “king of acid.”

Whatever uses it might have had in psychiatric settings — and there were many known at the time — LSD was made illegal in 1968 by the U.S. government, repressing what the government had itself helped bring into being. But it has since returned with newfound respectability. “Once dismissed as the dangerous dalliances of the counterculture,” writes Nature, psychedelic drugs are “gaining mainstream acceptance” in clinical treatment. Psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD “have been steadily making their way back into the lab,” notes Scientific American. “Scientists are rediscovering what many see as the substances’ astonishing therapeutic potential.”

None of this comes as news to San Francisco fixture Mark McCloud. “In the same moralistic manner many San Franciscans pontificate on the health benefits of marijuana,” writes Gregory Thomas at Mission Local, “McCloud and his friends tout the merits of acid.” Next to curing “anxiety, depression and ‘marital problems,’” it is also an important source of folk art, says McCloud, the owner and sole proprietor of the informally-named “LSD Museum” housed in his three-story Victorian home in San Francisco.

His mission in creating and maintaining the museum formally called the Institute of Illegal Images, he says, is to “preserve a ‘skeletal’ remnant of San Francisco’s drug-induced 1960s legacy, ‘so maybe our children can better understand us.’”

Specifically, as Culture Trip explains, McCloud preserves the art on sheets of blotter acid. As is clear from the many pop cultural references on blotter art — like Beavis and Butthead and techno artist Plastikman (who named his debut album Sheet One) — the 60s blotter acid legacy extended far beyond its founders’ vision in underground scenes throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and oughts.

Also known as the Blotter Barn or the Institute of Illegal Images, McCloud’s house is located on 20th Street between Mission and Capp. The house preserves over 33,000 sheets of LSD blotter, treating them like tiny little works of art. Most of the sheets are framed and hanging on McCloud’s walls, decorating the home with vibrant colors and patterns, and the rest are kept safe in binders. The house also features a perforation board, allowing McCloud to turn any work of art sized 7.5 by 7.5 inches into 900 pieces, as is typical for LSD blotter sheets.

McCloud has faced intense scrutiny from the FBI, and on a couple of occasions — in 1992 and again in 2001 — arrest and trial by “not very sympathetic” juries, who nonetheless acquitted him both times. Despite the fact that he has a larger collection of blotter acid sheets than the DEA, he and his museum have withstood prosecution and attempts to shut them down, since all the sheets in his possession have either never been dipped in LSD or have become chemically inactive over time. (The museum’s website explains the origins of “blotter” paper as a means of preparing LSD doses after the drug was criminalized in California in 1966.)

“What fascinates me about blotter is what fascinates me about all art. It changes your mind,” says McCloud in the Wired video at the top of the post. None of his museum’s artwork will change your mind in quite the way it was intended, but the mere association with hallucinogenic experiences is enough to inspire the artists “to build the myriad of subject matter appearing on the blotters,” Atlas Obscura writes, “ranging from the spiritual (Hindu gods, lotus flowers) to whimsical (cartoon characters), as well as cultural commentary (Gorbachev) and the just plain demented (Ozzy Osbourne).”

The museum does not keep regular hours and was only open by appointment before COVID-19. These days, it’s probably best to make a virtual visit at blotterbarn.com, where you’ll find dozens of images of acid blotter paper like those above and learn much more about the history and culture of LSD during long years of prohibition — a condition that seems poised to finally end as governments give up the wasteful, punishing War on Drugs and allow scientists and psychonauts to study and explore altered states of consciousness again.

When Michel Foucault Tripped on Acid in Death Valley and Called It “The Greatest Experience of My Life” (1975)

New LSD Research Provides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Potential to Promote Creativity

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Sound of Subways Around the World: A Global Collection of Subway Door Closing Announcements, Beeps & Chimes

in Life, Technology, Travel | August 16th, 2021

The next L train is now arriving on the Manhattan bound track. Please stand away from the platform edge.

Thus begins Brooklyn saxophone-percussion trio Moon Hooch’s “Number 9.”

Anyone who’s taken the train into the city from Bushwick or Williamsburg two or three times, you should be able to chant along with no trouble.

“Mind the gap!” is a sentimental favorite of both native Londoners and first time visitors navigating The Tube with freshly purchased Oyster Cards.

Residents of Montreal are justly proud that their Metro’s closing doors signal is a near twin of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Civil engineer Ted Green has been documenting the mass transit sounds that cue passengers that the subway doors are about to close since 2004, when he logged 26 seconds on the Piccadilly Line in London’s Russell Square Station:

In 2003 I used the Russell Square station daily for a week and it’s the first announcement that caught my attention… Back then the Piccadilly Line did not have on-train station and door closing announcements, it had the beeps, but the stations in central London had automatic announcements from platform speakers aimed at the open train door. Once the Piccadilly Line received on-train announcements a few years later, this announcement was phased out.

Over the course of a decade, the project has expanded to encompass announcements on suburban rail, railways, trams, and light rail.

His travels have taken him to Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, where curiosity compels him to document what happens during “dwell time,” the brief period when a train is disgorging some riders and taking on others.

Whether the canned recording is verbal or non-verbal, the intent is to keep things moving smoothly, and prevent injuries, though passengers can become blasé, attempting to force their way on or off by thrusting a limb between closing doors at the absolute last minute.

Green’s incredibly popular video compilations aren’t nearly so harrowing.

As he told The New York Times’ Sophie Haigney and Denise Lu:

I think the appeal is the simplicity. You wonder, how can there be so many different variations of beeps? And then you listen, and they’re all so different.

The pandemic only increased his audience, as locked down commuters found themselves longing for the soundtrack of normal life.

It’s the same impulse that led software developer Evan Lewis to make an app of New York City subway sounds.

For those who want to bone up on their lines, information designer Ilya Birman, author of Designing Transit Maps, has scripted lists of London Underground and New York City subway announcements.

And Brooklyn-based Metropolitan Transit Authority worker Fred Argoff’s zine Watch the Closing Doors ushered civilians behind the scenes, sometimes exploring other cities’ subway systems or, in the case of Cincinnati, lack thereof.

Readers, do you have a fondness for a particular underground sound? Tell us what and why in the comments.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

in Religion, Science | August 13th, 2021

Some public intellectuals associated with science court disagreement with religious believers; others cultivate suites of rhetorical techniques expressly in order to avoid it. While Carl Sagan didn’t shrink from, say, debating a creationist on talk radio, he always engaged with characteristic aplomb. But dealing with belligerent callers-in is easier, in a way, than responding to an earnest, straightforwardly expressed curiosity about one’s own religious beliefs. In the Q&A clip above, taken from his 1994 “lost lecture,” Sagan receives just such a question: “What is your personal religion? Is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a purpose, given that we’re just sitting on this speck in the middle of this sea of stars?”

“Now, I don’t want to duck any questions,” Sagan replies, “and I’m not going to duck this one.” Nevertheless, he requests a trifling clarification: “What do you mean when you use the word God?” Pressed by none other than Carl Sagan to define God, few of us would presumably hold up well.

Here the questioner changes his angle, drawing on Sagan’s own definition in Pale Blue Dot of the “Great Demotions,” those “down-lifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo’s facts, delivered to human pride.” And so, “given all these demotions,” the man asks, “why don’t we just blow ourselves up?”

“If we do blow ourselves up,” Sagan asks, “does that disprove the existence of God?” This is an intriguing reversal, but Sagan doesn’t simply reply to questions with questions. Scientific knowledge increasingly leaves us “on our own,” he says, which is a state “much more responsible than hoping someone will save us from ourselves.” What if we’re wrong, and a deity does indeed step in to save us? “Okay, that’s all right, I’m for that; we, you know, hedged our bets. It Pascal’s bargain run backwards.” The problem lies with God itself, “a word so ambiguous, that means so many different things,” and one used “to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree.” Despite its importance, not least for “social lubrication,” no term can be useful to truth that encompasses so many different personal conceptions — billions and billions of them, one might say.

Hear Carl Sagan Artfully Refute a Creationist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Darwinian Concept of Evolution is Profoundly Verified”

Carl Sagan Explains Evolution in an Eight-Minute Animation

Ted Turner Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Socialist?;” Sagan Responds Thoughtfully (1989)

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

200 Comic Book Adaptations of Classic Novels Created (1941–1971): Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Hamlet & More

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature | August 13th, 2021

Thanks to “the rise of comics as a ‘respectable’ medium,” Ross Johnson writes at Barnes and Noble, graphic novel adaptations now constantly reimagine literary classics for young readers. One Goodreads list collects over 200 recent graphic adaptations of classics from Austen to Kafka. These adaptations “aim to honor and embellish rather than replace the books on which they are based,” writes Johnson, “because how could they?” They do, however, allow us to “see, literally and figuratively, the stories we love from new angles.” They also give kids and adults who may not fancy themselves readers new ways to access and enjoy literary classics.

But are graphic adaptations really a new phenomenon? They may be newly respectable, but they’ve been around since the very dawn of comic books as a medium. Superman debuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, and in 1941, the first issue of Classics Illustrated appeared — an adaptation of The Three Musketeers, followed by Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo. The series was founded by Russian-born publisher Albert Kanter, who immediately seized on the potential of comic books as educational tools during what is now known as the Golden Age of Comics.

Even as a prestige series supposedly promoting “great literature,” Classics Illustrated did not escape the notice of Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocent began the moral panic over comic books in the 1950s. Wertham found fault with the graphic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Uncle Tom’s Cabin for reducing the novels to their most stereotypical and sensationalist elements. It’s the kind of criticism we might find levied against graphic adaptations of literature today, and in many cases, it may be warranted.

Few accused these graphic literary adaptations of being great art in their own right. But they accomplished Kanter’s purpose of getting comics readers excited about classic novels. The series ran for 30 years, ending in 1971, and became an international phenomenon. In Brazil and Greece, it published adaptations of authors from those countries.

A Classics Illustrated Junior series appeared in 1953, bringing children comics versions of folktales and myths. After the series first run, special issues, reprints, and revivals appeared in later decades, as well a series of television films in the 70s and 80s. You can peruse over 200 of these adaptations digitally scanned at the Internet Archive, artifacts of the Golden Age and ancestors of our current explosion of graphic novel adaptations of classic literature. For a deeper study of this publication, you can purchase the 2017 book, Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History.

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Take a Free Online Course on Making Comic Books, Compliments of the California College of the Arts

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch an Exquisite 19th Century Coffee Maker in Action

in Food & Drink, Physics, Science | August 13th, 2021

Pourover…

Cold brew…

Single origin…

Coffee snobbery may seem like a recent phenomenon, but the quest for the perfectly brewed cup has been going on for a very long time.

Behold the Continental Balancing Siphon, above — a completely automatic, 19th-century table top vacuum brewer.

There’s an unmistakable element of coffee making as theater here… but also, a fascinating demonstration of physical principles in action.

Vintage vacuum pot collector Brian Harris breaks down how the balancing siphon works:

Two vessels are arranged side-by-side, with a siphon tube connecting the two.

Coffee is placed in one side (usually glass), and water in the other (usually ceramic).

A spirit lamp heats the water, forcing it through the tube and into the other vessel, where it mixes with the coffee.

As the water is transferred from one vessel to the other, a balancing system based on a counterweight or spring mechanism is activated by the change in weight. This in turn triggers the extinguishing of the lamp. A partial vacuum is formed, which siphons the brewed coffee through a filter and back into the first vessel, from which is dispensed by means of a spigot.

(Still curious? We direct you to Harris’ website for a lengthier, more eggheaded explanation, complete with equations, graphs, and calculations for saturated vapor pressure and the approximate temperature at which downward flow begins.)

The balancing siphon was to 1850’s Paris and Vienna what Blue Bottle’s three-foot tall Japanese slow-drip iced coffee-making devices are to early 21st-century Brooklyn and Oakland.

Does the flavor of coffee brewed in a balance siphon merit the time and, if purchased in a cafe, expense?

Yes, according to Maria Tindemans, the CEO of Royal Paris, whose 24-carat gold and Bacarrat glass balancing siphon retails for between $17,500 and $24,000:

The coffee from a syphon can best be described as “crystal clear,” with great purity of flavor and aroma and no bitterness added by the brewing process.

More affordable balancing siphons can be found online, though be forewarned, all siphons are a bitch to clean, according to Reddit.

If you do invest, be sure to up the coffee snobbery by telling your captive audience that you’ve named your new device “Gabet,” in honor of Parisian Louis Gabet, whose 1844 patent for a counterweight mechanism kicked off the balancing siphon craze.

via Boing Boing

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Program That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Control (1953–1973)

Listen to Plato Invent the Myth of Atlantis (360 B.C)

Pompeii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesuvius

Take a Trip to the LSD Museum, the Largest Collection of “Blotter Art” in the World

The Sound of Subways Around the World: A Global Collection of Subway Door Closing Announcements, Beeps & Chimes

Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

200 Comic Book Adaptations of Classic Novels Created (1941–1971): Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Hamlet & More

Watch an Exquisite 19th Century Coffee Maker in Action

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