• The cartels making millions off sand
• How change actually happens
• Considering the history and handwringing behind the hooded sweatshirt
• A woman who spent more than a year alone in a lightless cave
• Reclaiming a fruit that’s both a summer staple and a fraught symbol
David A. Taylor | Scientific American | February 1, 2024 | 3,485 words
My favorite subplot of Barry? The romantic relationship between Chechen mafioso NoHo Hank and Bolivian crime boss Cristobal. In season four, ostensibly in an attempt to move away from criminal life, they decide to import sand. When I watched the episode in which they hatch a plan, I’d thought it was an inspired comic bit; only once I read David A. Taylor’s story did I realize that sand mafias are very real. Sand is one of the main ingredients in concrete, and given that construction worldwide has been booming for decades, we could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. In this piece, Taylor writes about the devastating impact of sand mining and looting on ecosystems that are already fragile, and on vulnerable communities in places like Mozambique and Kenya (and how one woman in Kenya’s Makueni County successfully fought the sand cartel in Nairobi and introduced a regulated, sustainable approach). Stories of organized crime aside, it’s really the simple yet eye-opening details that make this piece, like the fact that China used more cement in just three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Or that half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined. Or that sand from rivers and lakebeds, not coastal areas, is ideal for building, and builders who skimp on better sand end up constructing buildings that are flat-out dangerous (just look at the destruction in Turkey and Syria from the February 2023 earthquake, one expert tells Taylor). A fascinating story on a global issue that more people should be talking about. —CLR
Rebecca Solnit | Literary Hub | January 11, 2024 | 1,745 words
Whenever I plant seeds, I want immediate payoff. Notoriously impatient, I’ll check on them mere hours after planting to see if they’ve sprouted. Now? (No.) Now? (No.) How about now? With all things, I need evidence that my actions will take root and bear fruit. Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece at Lit Hub gave me some much-needed perspective on the slow pace of change, be it personal or political. Popular culture suggests that all-important turning points come after the impassioned speech or the meet cute, but in reality, true change is imperceptible and incremental, and progress is hard to pinpoint. In this piece, Solnit focuses on the years of advocacy and baby steps that, taken one after another, can lead to a shift in government policy that benefits the environment. What I appreciated most about this piece is Solnit’s gentle reminder that, for the most part, change happens when you’re not looking. For me, that not-looking is both a solution and a problem to be solved. At its best, not looking means keeping the faith that action will beget change; at its worst, it means avoiding the personal reflection necessary to achieve those tiny, cumulative changes that add up to real progress. “A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient,” she writes. According to Solnit, if you take it slow, over time you’ll find perspective. It just depends on how you look at it. —KS
Nicholas Russell | The Point | January 23, 2024 | 3,053 words
“At a glance,” Nicholas Russell writes, “there is no coherent history of the hood as a symbol for anything.” As we know all too well, that changed in our lifetimes—first with the arrival of hip-hop, and then irrevocably with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. But as Russell deftly unpacks in The Point, the hood’s unique position as a cultural signifier exposes far more than this country’s cancerous paranoia about young Black men. Even if this isn’t a piece he wanted to write, having cars swerve at you on two separate occasions while you’re running in a hoodie has a way of changing things. So Russell considers the garment from every angle imaginable. As a guarantor of boy-genius tech-world wizardry. A flashpoint of respectability politics. An easy shorthand for crime-show producers. And of course, in its pointed variant, as an icon of American hatred and bigotry. None of them, though, seem likely to eclipse its current mournful status. Russell is as resigned to that fact as he is resentful: “The hoodie is redolent with meaning no matter what I do, no matter what anyone does. Its legacy is a divorced one, operatic and ugly.” —PR
D.T. Max | The New Yorker | January 21, 2024 | 7,430 words
Spelunking (a delightful word—go on, say it out loud) means cave exploration, but Beatriz Falmini took it to a whole new level. After realizing she’d “never had a bad time in a cave,” as D.T. Max writes, Falmini decides to spend 500 days in one, neither seeing nor speaking to another human being. If you struggled during COVID-19 lockdowns, imagine nearly a year and a half alone . . . in the dark. In some intense reporting, Max pushes Flamini to dive deep into her experience. Even the logistics of organizing 500 days in a cave is more gripping than most thrillers; I have never found facts about food delivery and hygiene more fascinating. Moving on to Flamini outside the cave, Max realizes “she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.” The more time he spends with her, the more reality he uncovers: This experience was anything but a breeze. The darkness sapped life. The cave nearly broke her. It’s hard to fathom the psychology of spending so long underground, but Max does an excellent job of getting beneath Falmini’s bravado to do so. —CW
Jori Lewis | Switchyard | November 25, 2023 | 4,744 words
Watermelon has been in the zeitgeist lately. The humble fruit is an important emblem of Palestinian resistance, which means that, over the last three months, images of it have appeared at everything from street protests to Paris fashion week. In the context of US cultural history, however, watermelon carries different connotations—racist ones. Jori Lewis examines these crude and cruel associations in her essay for Switchyard, an exciting new magazine based at the University of Tulsa. She draws on her family’s experiences to show the complicated relationship many Black Americans have with watermelon, but her piece is about much more than the harm stereotypes can do. Lewis is interested in reclaiming meaning, and as is so often the case, that requires looking beyond US borders and deep into the past. This essay is beautifully rendered, taking readers from the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, to a roadside fruit stand in Senegal, to the agricultural fields of China, in search of watermelon as both sustenance and symbol. “The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. Cultures have associated it with fertility, solidarity, and luck. Watermelon can both cure hunger and quench thirst, and Lewis bookends her essay with scenes where she lets a juicy slice do the latter. By the time she gets to the second instance, watermelon feels to the reader like a thing transformed. “I felt an ever so slight twinge about me in this Black body in a white man’s field and all that has ever meant. But it was hot, and I was thirsty,” Lewis writes. “I took it with my fingers, and I ate.” —SD
Audience Award
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Jasper Craven | The New Republic | January 16, 2024 | 5,484 words
At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’” —KS
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Alastair Humphreys has been everywhere imaginable, it seems. He’s even made a career out of pushing other people to follow their own exploratory spirits. But as he tells us in this Noēma piece, one day he realized he’d never applied his philosophy of “microadventures” to his own backyard. So he ordered a map of the 20 square kilometers around his house in England—and what follows is a lovely meditation on finding wonder in the everyday.
I studied my map for a while and found what appeared to be its most boring grid square: no roads, houses or rivers, just a single footpath, one pond and the merest flutter of a lonely contour line. Here, it seemed, was nothing at all, neatly outlined within crisp blue lines.
It was the ideal place to begin.
I folded up the map and headed out to have a look at nothing.
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Hoods themselves have no overarching meaning as a signifier. As Nicholas Russell points out in this probing essay for The Point, they can evoke everyone from Emperor Palpatine to tech bros. But the hooded sweatshirt is another matter entirely; it completed its trajectory with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, lodging inextricably in our collective consciousness.
Rankine knew the hoodie would forever be associated with the murder of Trayvon Martin, that that association redirects but doesn’t necessarily reframe the hoodie as a symbol of black masculinity. There can be no other political association attached to it after the numbing scrutiny thrust onto it—first after Martin’s murder, again during the protests of 2020, and once more after that, on the tenth anniversary of Martin’s death. The hood, politicized, commented upon, reclaimed, commodified, floats in space like it does on Citizen’s jacket, as powerful and defanged as an abstraction. Which is what it remained for me, for so long. A hood is a piece of clothing, an object of no importance. And yet, somehow, stubbornly, even though I wish it didn’t, it remains a haunted emblem.
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In this excerpt of her forthcoming book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison recounts the early months of her daughter’s life. During that period, Jamison juggled a book tour, a teaching career, and the demands of a newborn—amid the growing realization that she wanted to leave her marriage.
Because I could not hurl myself constantly into work and trips and teaching and deadlines, I had to look more closely at the life I’d built: this husband, this marriage. It was impossible to ignore my daily desire to leave—to wander the cold streets of our neighborhood with our baby, making ceaseless, ever-widening loops away from home.
Every day that fall, I asked myself some permutation of the same questions. Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a home with C’s anger? What did I owe his pain? What did I owe my daughter? When I told myself she would get better versions of both her parents if we did not live together, was I simply telling myself a story that would justify the choice I already wanted to make?
During a conversation years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told my friend Harriet that I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or, at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of those things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.
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Emily Latimer | Longreads | January 18, 2024 | 4,924 words (17 minutes)
Last summer, I was struck with a decade-old memory: I was hypnotized as a teenager.
“Remember when they hypnotized us at that school event?” I asked my sister, Jessica. “What was all that about?”
“That was kinda weird, actually,” she laughed.
The weird part is no one questioned hypnotizing a bunch of teenagers. They still don’t. Every year, teens are brought on stage and hypnotized in front of their peers. My time came when I was 17 years old. I had stayed up all night at Safe Grad, an organized event that ran from midnight to 6 a.m. at our local university’s gymnasium—to save us kids from the perils of drinking after prom. Ostensibly, it was better to sleep-deprive students than let them pass out in a field from alcohol poisoning.
There was heaps of food, organized games, a blow-up slide, and, the main event: Ian Stewart—Master Hypnotist. All night we asked each other, in a state of overtired excitement, Are you gonna get hypnotized? It wasn’t like any of us knew what that actually meant. We were just game for whatever. Each year, hilarious tales of on-stage hypnosis trickled down through the grades. We were ready for our turn.
The hypnotist was speaking in a dull monotone, performing a test to see who to bring on stage.
Focus on your hands locking together.
They won’t come apart no matter how hard you try to pull them.
Concentrate.
My hands felt vise-gripped together. I strained to free them. Then, the hypnotist said: “On the count of three, your hands will come apart. One, two, three.” Hands flew apart all around the room. The crowd laughed nervously, exchanging side-eyes. I guess I did something right; I was brought on stage.
I remember the squeak of classroom chairs. Dozens of high school kids sat on the stage wearing red grad shirts, popping against a black backdrop. We slumped excessively. Sleep, the hypnotist said. We dropped our heads on the shoulders of the person next to us. I think one person even fell out of their chair. Someone was told to sing karaoke in Chinese. Another classmate acted as an interpreter. “Can you ask him what was the name of the song he was singing?” the hypnotist asked. The two exchange words in unintelligible gobbledygook, like Sims speaking their native language, Simlish. “Single Ladies,” she deadpans. The laughter was next-level.
I look back on the event now with a huge question mark. What was I doing up there acting like a fool? Was I just going along with whatever the guy told me to do? Is that what hypnotism is? Is this even ethical?
I find myself on the flashy websites of stage hypnotists. They have names that ooze confidence: “The Incredible Boris,” “The Jeff West Experience,” and “The World’s Greatest Hypnotist.” I stumble naively into their world, blindly fumbling to understand the rules that govern who you can turn into a pig. Turns out, it’s complicated.
There’s so much questionable information when it comes to hypnosis—and language is paramount. I was scolded for using words like “trance” and “susceptibility.” Semantics is everything. Words are the cornerstone, the hypnotist’s main tool, and are carefully selected and peppered throughout the act. Of course they are: words are how people are coaxed into a state of hypnosis, after all. (I probably shouldn’t say “coax.”)
“Sleep” is another one. “We use the word sleep a lot and truth to be known it has nothing to do with sleep,” one hypnotist told me. “When people are hypnotized, they look asleep. In reality, they’re very much awake.” After each interview with one of these fancy-named hypnotists, I heave a big sigh and read my notes to suss out the sometimes contradictory information. “The hypnotists keep confusing me,” I complained to my sister. “Maybe they hypnotized you,” she said.
Before I went any further, I needed to understand how someone is actually hypnotized. Trusty WikiHow informed me to “Smile at the audience and speak in a calm, even-toned voice while you introduce yourself and explain what you’re going to do.” I watched YouTube videos. I tried it out on my cat (who, upon being commanded to sit, promptly stalked out of the room).
But despite my cat’s—and the seemingly widespread—belief that hypnosis is bullshit; it appears to be real. Simply put, hypnosis is just a state of focused concentration and deep relaxation happening simultaneously. Hypnotists give verbal suggestions to willing participants who are gradually lulled into a state of altered awareness in which they’re more open to behavior changes. During hypnosis, the critical nature of the mind is bypassed and the subconscious mind is in a more suggestible state, hence why subjects act so silly and uninhibited on stage. Hypnotists hush our brains’ analytic tendencies: Shhhh, stop worrying about your tax return and cluck like a chicken.
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Stage hypnotists, researchers, and government web pages all agree: you cannot be hypnotized against your will. An amenable participant is a vital ingredient—the hypnotized person must agree to go along with suggestions. I was surprised to learn that you can’t be forced into a hypnotic state. I blame the ridiculous hypnosis scene in Zoolander that suggests otherwise. (“You can help these children Derek, by killing the prime minister of Malaysia!”)
In reality, you allow yourself to be hypnotized by voluntarily altering your consciousness. Like improv, it’s a sort of suggestibility dance between hypnotist and subject: the hypnotist gives you a prompt; you say “Yes, and…” In other words, you are hypnotizing yourself. Just as some people are musically gifted, some of us are more easily hypnotized. About 10 to 15 percent of us are highly hypnotizable. Another 15 to 20 percent struggle to be hypnotized or can’t experience it at all. The rest lie somewhere in between.
While it may be tempting to suggest that those of us who fall easily into a state of hypnosis are weak-willed, that’s not true. I got called out for it: “Everybody is suggestible,” hypnotist Gerard V told me via email. “Just take a look at the variety of obvious misinformation and ridiculous beliefs people have picked up off the internet and you’ll see that we are all easily influenced,” he says. “Compared to politics and advertising, hypnotists are amateur.”
Studies have shown that hypnotizability is not correlated with intelligence, persuasibility, personality, or even neuroticism or psychoticism. What is important is a person’s ability to fully attend to a narrowly focused task, like reading. Researchers in the 1960s found that hypnotizability was correlated with the subjects’ tendency to have hypnosis-like experiences in their everyday lives. Modern-day equivalents, like playing video games or watching TikToks, can all drop you into a quasi-state of hypnosis. Turns out that mindlessly watching videos of women organizing their spotless refrigerators is excellent hypnotic training. But I was curious how the pros did it.
There are two main elements to hypnosis. First up is the induction, cues given to a participant to put them into a suggestible state, like “Take a deep breath.” Then come the actual suggestions, like “You’ll imagine yourself stuck to your chair.” There are also deepeners, like counting down from three, which help lead volunteers further into hypnosis.
Turns out that mindlessly watching videos of women organizing their spotless refrigerators is excellent hypnotic training.
Trained stage hypnotists typically lean on gags and skits. In Las Vegas casinos, expect adult humor and off-color jokes. On cruise ships, vacationers mime swimming through shark-infested waters. At university orientations, students bob their heads along with a stuffed doll. Hypnosis can transform a tough redneck cowboy into a flirtatious lady racking up men’s phone numbers. It can encourage a camp counselor to admit they would spend $1,000 on marijuana—in front of all of their bosses. But don’t try anything with the suits: at corporate retreats, engineers, lawyers, and accountants resist hypnosis. “They’re too analytical,” says Jeff Oatman, a stage hypnotist in Ontario with the stage name Jeff West. “They’re the worst to hypnotize.”
Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told me that while he knows hypnosis as a phenomenon exists, he thinks that all stage hypnosis for entertainment relies on stagecraft and tricks rather than something real. He covers hypnosis in his course, The Psychology of Magic. “Effects of stage ‘hypnosis’ are likely due to psychological factors, participant selection, suggestibility (wanting to have a good time in front of friends), physical manipulation, occasionally intoxication, and stagecraft (trickery),” he told me via email.
Could people really be faking it for laughs? As a stage-hypnotized teen myself, I can say I definitely wasn’t an audience plant, and hypnotists are quick to point out that they can easily spot fakers and remove them from the stage. One hypnotist says truly hypnotized volunteers are easy to spot. “There’s a look—an eye fixation and a slump to the cheekbones,” he says. My hypnosis felt similar to the time I steered an Ouija board with my two best friends when I was 13. It didn’t feel like I was the person moving it—though it was conveniently spelling the word I had projected in my mind. (“Recklessly,” for the record.) Was it a spirit, something bigger than me? All I knew was that I was focusing hard, channeling my energy to see what would come up. I believed in the task at hand and thought it into existence. This physical manifestation is the closest thing I can liken to my experience of being hypnotized. I made a push towards the unknown, going with the vibe to see what would happen.
I needed a true faker’s perspective. My good friend Mitchell was a total clown when he was hypnotized at his safe grad event. He’s also a skeptic. “I definitely faked my hypnosis,” he says. He went into it thinking it was complete bullshit but thought he could make people laugh. “I like to humiliate myself for the amusement of others, but it got me thinking. Maybe hypnosis is just that—a chill person to say ‘yes and’ to your bits.” By the end of our conversation, he was less sure that he had “definitely” faked the hypnosis. Doubt lingers. “I’ve been stuck on it,” he admits. “Would I even know if I was hypnotized? It sounds too crazy to be true.”
Gerard V told me people often think they’re faking, but they’re not. “It gets complex because people often come with some preconceived ideas about what it must be like to be hypnotized, and then when their experience is different to that expectation, claim they were not under at all,” he says. “This can be funny when someone after a show claims they weren’t really under and were just ‘going along with it,’ but then cannot remember doing an epic air guitar solo until you show them the video.”
Stage hypnosis is a wild profession. A traveling comedian mixed with a magician. The five comedy hypnotists I spoke to also dabbled in side-quests, like video game characters: chainsaw juggling, hypnotizing daytime talk show guests, or using hypnosis to treat addiction. They were patient with me, debunking myths as I questioned their field of work.
“One of the problems with hypnosis is that it was once perceived as a sort of fiefdom of—I don’t know how to describe them—but maybe, creepy guys?” says hypnotist and hypnotherapist Albert Nerenberg. “Men who want power over people and think that hypnosis is a way to do that.” But that’s changing, he says. At this year’s Hypnothoughts—allegedly the largest hypnosis conference in the world—Nerenberg says it was almost gender equal, with women making up nearly half of the speakers and participants.
Worldwide, there are more than 16,000 hypnotists registered with the National Guild of Hypnotists, a not-for-profit to advance the practice of hypnosis. Perhaps not a profession regularly suggested by a high school guidance counselor, but stage hypnotists are a dedicated bunch. They travel far and wide to do hundreds of shows each year to make people laugh. But that wasn’t always the goal.
“One of the problems with hypnosis is that it was once perceived as a sort of fiefdom of—I don’t know how to describe them—but maybe, creepy guys?” says hypnotist and hypnotherapist Albert Nerenberg.
It’s taken 200 years for hypnotism to evolve from a medical treatment to stage gag. The first use of hypnotism dates back to the 1770s, when Franz Mesmer, a German physician, put people into “trances” to realign their magnetic fields and cure their ailments. In his 1779 work, Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism, Mesmer describes 27-year-old Franzel Oesterline, a woman suffering from a “convulsive malady” in which “blood rushed to her head and there set up the most cruel toothaches and earaches.” He used a magnet to “disrupt the gravitational tides adversely affecting” her and induce the sensation of fluid draining from her body, and with it, the illness. Her recovery was instant. (The magnet, of course, had nothing to do with the cure. It was just a prop.) The hypnotic suggestion did the trick. “Mesmerism,” as it became known, was popular for about 10 years before France’s “greatest medical rogue” was discredited by Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier through a series of experiments.
Fifty-some years later, a Scottish surgeon, James Braid, used a similar technique of fixed attention that he called “hypnosis” after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, to cure headaches and even anesthetize patients. Remarkably, hypnosis is still used to sedate people undergoing minor surgeries today. At a hospital in Brussels in 2019, one patient was fully awake while surgeons removed two parathyroid glands from her throat, while an anesthesiologist asked her to imagine Thanksgiving dinner at home, candles flickering in a windowsill. And in the US, some hospitals offer hypnosis to combat pre-operative anxiety and to manage post-operative pain. It’s not a magic trick, but more like a sleight of hand to distract the patient from what’s going on around them.
I’m told it’s not as prominent these days, but there has been an ongoing rift between stage hypnotists and medical practitioners. (Though, notably, some stage hypnotists dabble in both.) Devin Terhune, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies suggestion and hypnosis, says there are “disagreements” among academic researchers when it comes to the use of hypnosis for entertainment’s sake. “The vast majority of stage hypnotists have good intentions,” he says. “But it’s a bit unfortunate that stage hypnosis contributes to a lot of these negative and unrealistic ideas.” Terhune feels the practice has “lingering negative consequences for the depiction of hypnosis that I think are harmful to its clinical application in a wide range of contexts.”
Meanwhile, Ian Stewart, the entertainer who hypnotized me, maintains that without stage hypnotists, the whole craft would be dead in the water. “The general psychologist crew didn’t like hypnosis shows because they said we were degrading it, making it a spectacle,” Stewart says. “But we actually do a lot of advertising.”
Many of the stage hypnotists said their fascination started as teenagers. Young and impressionable, they stumbled upon a hypnosis book, watched a hypnotist get laughs on TV, or saw someone perform a hypnotic induction as a party trick. The draw for many would-be hypnotists was the ability to make people laugh, amaze their friends, or stand out from the crowd.
Boris Cherniak has been hypnotizing audiences as “The Incredible Boris” for 41 years. His obsession with hypnosis began in the library stacks at York University in Ontario, Canada. Enrolled in a psychology course at night, he picked up a book at random off a shelf: The Search for Bridey Murphy, a 1956 story that chronicles an experiment in deep-trance hypnosis. “I needed to know more,” Cherniak says. “That started me on a wave of reading absolutely everything I could on the subject.”
Eventually, he started playing around with hypnosis at teenage parties. He was paid $150 for his first show: a friend’s dad invited him to perform at his nightclub in Toronto, though he was only 17—not even old enough to drink. “It was exhilarating. That’s the best way I could put it,” he says. “It’s like, I did not know that was even possible.” Cherniak went on to own comedy clubs in Toronto, hypnotize guests out of their phobias on Maury Povich’s tabloid talk show, and even entertain troops in Afghanistan. “I want to make sure that everybody has such a good time. I’m all about empowerment,” he says.
Out of all audiences and participants, the hypnotists I spoke to all agreed that teenagers are the most reliably enthusiastic group. “High school students are so open-minded,” says hypnotist Jeff Oatman. “They are right into it.” It’s no coincidence that hypnotists tend to take up the craft while they’re teens and teens are the best audiences. Teenagers have natural hypnotic abilities. Compared to adults, they enter hypnotic states easily and rapidly and are highly responsive to suggestions. Studies show that most adolescents are used to spontaneous hypnotic-like states of focused concentration of some type—remember the hypnotic power of TikTok? Their openness and imaginative capacity make them prime candidates for hypnosis. Plus it’s fun to be silly.
But just because they can be, should teens be hypnotized? Sure, they agree to the hypnotizability test, and if they weren’t down to clown, they wouldn’t volunteer to begin with. But you still don’t consent to any precise behaviors you may perform before getting up on that stage.
I asked my now grown-up friends about their experience of being hypnotized, and most chalked it up to low-brow entertainment that’s not worthy of intense scrutiny. It’s a social contract and it’s not inherently unethical, since at its base hypnosis is just a suggestion. Participants can choose to ignore it. Intellectually, this argument made sense. But I wanted to speak to someone who was freshly hypnotized.
My high school isn’t one to switch up programming. Ten years after I sat in those chairs in front of my classmates in a hypnotic state, 18-year-old Tristan Bonnell did the same at his after-grad party. He had finished a game of basketball with friends and was looking forward to what he thought was a magic show. “Then he said he was a hypnotist,” he told me. “A bunch of my buddies just looked at me and said, ‘You should go do it.’” Alongside a dozen or so classmates, Bonnell sat in a chair at the front of the room. “I thought I was gonna go down and like, screw around. Just try to put on a show for everyone as much as I could,” he says. But it turns out Bonnell was an excellent subject.
Imagine you’re standing on the top of a staircase, the hypnotist said.
Close your eyes. Get really relaxed.
I’m going to count down from 10 to one.
As I count down, you’re going to go deeper down that staircase.
Bonnell was dedicated: “I focused really hard to follow the steps very correctly because I wanted to see if it actually worked,” he says, noting that his positive mindset was likely what helped him get to a state of deep hypnosis. By the time the hypnotist got to number one, Bonnell was out like a light. “I felt like I was in my own bed at home, but I just took like, three melatonin and then listened to sleep music on YouTube,” he says. “I thought I was in a deep, deep sleep.”
In reality, classmates watched as Bonnell acted as a security guard on stage. He was instructed that laughing was illegal, and he had to police those who broke the rule. Bonnell yelled at the crowd to stop laughing, which only prompted more of it. “My stomach was in pain from laughing so hard,” my younger cousin Jenna, who witnessed the show, told me. Bonnell says he remembers none of it. When the hypnotic suggestions were canceled and he came to, he was mortified. Not by his actions—but because he thought he fell asleep in front of his grad class. His classmates said he was hypnotized, doing all these hilarious things on stage. “I didn’t believe them. But then they started showing me videos.” I watched one of the videos. “Stop laughing!” he yelled at his classmates, to screams of laughter. They didn’t stop.
Troubling reports of hypnosis gone wrong have surfaced throughout the years. In 2012, a gaggle of 14-year-old girls from Quebec felt nauseous and dazed for hours after they participated in a hypnotism show at their school. “The young hypnotist had to bring in his mentor to snap people back to normal,” the Canadian Press reported at the time. And in a strange legal case circa 1998, Christopher Gates sued a stage hypnotist after taking part in a show for more than two hours, in which he pretended to be Mick Jagger, a ballet dancer, an interpreter for aliens from outer space, a contestant on the show Blind Date, an orchestra conductor, and a naughty schoolboy. The mild-mannered furniture polisher said the show left him fearing for his life, too scared to take a shower, and hearing secret commands from the TV soap Coronation Street. Four years later, Gates alleged in court that the show triggered acute schizophrenia that landed him in hospital (although a judge ruled that hypnotism did not cause his mental illness and it was just an unfortunate coincidence).
Ingrid Libera, an actor in Vancouver, Canada, was also hypnotized at her dry grad party, 10 years ago. The stage show itself was pretty typical, if a little weird. “He had me doing stand-up comedy in German, and like, pretending to fart all over the place,” she says. But the truly strange part came after the show was over. Libera felt off, overwhelmed, and had trouble being around people. Inexplicably, she felt a curious link to the man who hypnotized her. “I wanted him to be around. I just felt so attached to him. I needed him to be there with me, but he was gone. I felt like I was in love with him,” she says. Attracted? To the middle-aged man with dark hair and mustache, adorned in a purple crushed velvet suit? Yup.
Libera hid away in a room with parental chaperones and two close friends, bawling. “I got really, really emotional because I was frustrated and scared,” she says. “I was like, Why do I feel like this? What is happening?” She felt a little better the next day, but it took a few weeks for the embarrassment of what she did on stage and afterward to wear off. Libera still struggles with what happened, because it brought up questions about her suggestibility. “What’s wrong with me though? That I am so suggestible to just listen to somebody like that. It was honestly a lot of introspection to get over that.”
Though she is aware her experience was likely out of the ordinary, when I asked Libera whether teens should be hypnotized on stage, it was a huge no. “This shouldn’t just be a normal sideshow attraction. I don’t think people understand how intense it can be for some of us.”
Inexplicably, she felt a curious link to the man who hypnotized her. “I wanted him to be around. I just felt so attached to him. I needed him to be there with me, but he was gone. I felt like I was in love with him,” she says.
In a 1987 study in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, researchers surveyed participants after a university stage show. About one-fifth of subjects reported both a negative experience during the trance and some negative after effects. “Stage hypnosis poses risks that are unacceptable and outweigh its potential entertainment value and therapeutic benefits,” the researchers concluded. But hypnotists I spoke to maintain that ethical performers spend a great deal of time thinking about integrity, obtaining participants’ consent, and reminding participants they are in control of their experience. Still, when it comes to the mind, we know very little about how it works and what goes on between our ears. “Anyone who tells you with absolute certainty ‘this is how the mind works’ is fooling themselves,” Gerard V reminds me.
I’m down south, sitting on a beach. It’s too hot. I’m sweating, fanning myself with my hands. Suddenly, it’s too cold. I’m shivering, my teeth are chattering. Did the temperature just drop 30 degrees? I cuddle up next to my best friend. Relief is brief. Now it smells terrible. We jump away from each other, shatter our embrace. The audience goes wild. That’s the moment I remember most about my hypnosis.
Stewart, the man behind the gag, is a kindly Nova Scotian who has lived and breathed hypnosis since he graduated high school in 2000. A magician turned hypnotist, turned world-record-holding chainsaw juggler, Stewart is a self-described entertainer. In junior high, he read the Encyclopedia of Genuine Stage Hypnotism by Ormond McGill and became obsessed. Since then, he’s done more than 2,000 shows. While the basics of the craft have remained stable, Stewart says it’s “fallen out of fashion to bring people up on stage and make fun of them.” For a time, hypnotists would have people do ridiculous racist or sexist stereotypes—like singing in Chinese or men pretending they were Miss America contestants. “There’s stuff I wouldn’t do anymore,” Stewart says. “Society has moved away from laughing at people.” Now, rather than embarrassing participants, Stewart’s gags show off the power of the mind.
The craft is evolving. Beyond updating bits to stay current politically and socially, some stage hypnotists are even trying to leave their participants better off than they were before the show. Nerenberg says responsible stage hypnotists should move away from public humiliation and instead usher in positive changes. “The fact that you can feel hot and cold is actually interesting because that also means you can feel confident, capable, or intelligent,” he says. “You can make positive suggestions that change people’s lives.”
Hypnotists told me stories of all kinds of miracles that came from stage shows: chronic pain vanished or a years-long mutism reversed. But many feel that hypnotists shouldn’t meddle with people’s psyches at all. The subreddit for hypnosis is essentially ground zero for disagreements about the craft. It seems there is no cohesion—even among stage hypnotists. I watch as they battle it out online: “Stage hypnosis is damaging the public’s views on hypnosis,” one Reddit post reads. A commenter offered an opposing take: “Even in the most silly high school stage show, or most R-rated Vegas hypnosis show, those hypnotists have the option to always add personal improvement suggestions at some point in the show—such as optimism for the future, or having more self-confidence. . . .”
Another commenter was vehemently against this line of thinking. “A stage show is consent to participate in a comedy routine, a raunchy display, or what-have-you. That is the expectation. It is not consent for therapeutic suggestion,” they wrote. I fall into that camp. A careless, if good-natured, suggestion could torpedo an ongoing healing process the stage hypnotist is not privy to. And doing therapy without explicit informed consent, especially in front of a crowd, is inherently unethical. Make me quack like a duck, sure, but let’s leave therapeutic treatments to the privacy of a hypnotherapy office.
In Europe, stage hypnosis has been viewed as a public concern since the 1880s—resulting in national, regional, and local bans on public hypnotism in Denmark, Austria, Germany, Italy, and France. (The Belgian law was enforced as recently as 2017.) So am I okay that my school in Canada was prepared to run the risk and have me hypnotized? That they still hypnotize a bunch of teens every year? A bevy of conflicting information swirls in my head as I try to make sense of it all.
My fingers hesitate and hover over my keyboard. I try to take a stance. Don’t piss off the stage hypnotists, I tell myself, their hearts are in the right place. I’m torn. To make a blanket statement that all stage hypnosis is damaging isn’t fair to those hypnotists who make an effort to approach subjects with compassion and sidestep offensive tropes. (And make people laugh!) In front of huge crowds, hypnotists command a room and engage with strangers from all walks of life—who, amazingly, trust them. They mold the mind, coddle it, and ratchet up roars of laughter as each beat of the sketch unfolds. They are no strangers to extreme reactions: angry skeptics, incredulous onlookers, awestruck teenagers. They’re innovators, rebranding themselves as psychics, mesmerists, or mentalists depending on the decade. They open themselves up to criticism and still answer interview requests from a nosey journalist unpacking a decades-old experience. And, after all, there will always be unfortunate acts that perpetuate negative stereotypes and do a disservice to the broader industry. (I’m sure other stage hypnotists whisper about them in their own tight circles.)
But to brush past those who had bizarre aftereffects, even if rare, would be irresponsible. It would be wise to tell audiences that even carefree stage hypnosis could be emotionally difficult or disturb existing mental health conditions. Ingrid Libera suggests participants sign a waiver that explicitly mentions potential side effects—and perhaps she is on the right track.
Confusion is rife in stage hypnosis, especially for participants. A knowledge gap is evident. There’s a veil of obscuration where transparency would be best. “Where do you think your mind went when you were hypnotized?” I asked 18-year-old Bonnell.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought maybe it was a form of hallucination almost— playing mind tricks.”
“Were you freaked out at all?” I pressed. “Were you like, who is operating my body?”
“I’ve actually never thought of it like that. But that’s actually a good point,” he says. “I wonder where my mind was at to even do those things.”
I hoped that after my weeks of research and interviews, I would be able to tell him. Instead, I open another web page—rife with contradictions—and continue down the rabbit hole.
Emily Latimer is a journalist and fact-checker in Nova Scotia. She’s written for the CBC, Canadian Business, Maclean’s, and elsewhere. You can find her stories at www.emilylatimer.com.
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After water, sand is the world’s most widely consumed natural resource—it’s the main ingredient in concrete, and a booming global construction industry means a soaring (yet hidden) demand for it. For Scientific American, David A. Taylor offers a fascinating look at the world of sand-smuggling mafias and the devastating impact of sand mining on ecosystems and communities.
Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime’s extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined, he says.
The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.
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For LitHub, Rebecca Solnit offers a salve to those fighting for change, be it personal or political. Dramatic turning points are rare and happen most often in the movies; the change we seek only comes after years and years of dedication, baby step after baby step taken on faith.
Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.
And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.
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