Erik Davis radio show: 'Expanding Mind'

Check this out: Erik Davis is now hosting a radio show on the Progressive Radio Network called Expanding Mind, and podcasts are available for the first three shows as of this posting. Two of these shows would be of direct interest to DoseNation readers, but I would expect pretty much all of these programs to have a broader appeal as the series continues. Here are the most recent two:

07/30/09 - Interview with J. P. Haripignies, the author of Delusions of Normality: Sanity, Drugs, Sex, Money and Beliefs in America. We will talk about how much more kinky, crazy, and mystically inclined we are than we think we are.

07/23/09 - This week's guest on Expanding Mind will be Mike Jay, a British historian of drugs and medicine, talking about his new book The Atmosphere of Heaven, which relates the fascinating, politically- charged story of the discovery of nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas.

Meanwhile, over on Erik's Techgnosis site, he has a review of Jay's book that might pique your interest a little further:

The Atmosphere of Heaven, Mike Jay’s latest book of hard-as-nails history of consciousness, tells the curious story of the Pneumatic Institution, a somewhat heretical outpost of British medical exploration where chemistry, poetry, and Jacobin politics crossed. Researchers at the Institution, founded at the close of the eighteenth century by the clearly excellent Thomas Beddoes, had the good fortune and cleverness to discover, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the giddy metaphysical glee of sucking down bags of nitrous oxide. Jay enlivens his story with well-drawn characters—including Samuel Coleridge, the brilliant Humphry Davy, and the very fat and lovable Dr. Beddoes—while the economic, political, and philosophical turbulence of the time is almost too vividly invoked. Indeed, though Jay’s exacting assessment of the era’s struggles with tyranny, recession, war, and the deflation of liberty curtail some of the book's escapist potential, these contemporary shudders are somewhat compensated by the modestly comforting realization that, at least as far as modernity goes, it was ever thus.