PinnedWhy Are Psychedelics Illegal?From Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change On March 1, 2016, in the morning, I rode an elevator to the eleventh floor of a building in Chinatown and sat in a surprisingly high-ceilinged — for being so far up in the sky — courtroom with sixty to eighty people. Two grand…Psychedelics36 min readPsychedelics36 min read
Sep 9, 2021First chapter of Leave Societya novel by Tao Lin published by Vintage in 2021 Surgery The day Li arrived in Taipei for a ten-week visit, he and his parents went to a surgeon to discuss his chest deformity. The surgeon asked Li what he did. Li said he wrote novels. “Knows about everything, then?” “I…Tao Lin6 min readTao Lin6 min read
Oct 21, 2020BOOKS I READ OR REREAD FROM NOVEMBER 22, 2014 TO JANUARY 1, 2016*This was posted on my now defunct Tumblr in 2016 INTRODUCTION I read/reread more books in the past 14 months than any other 14-month period of my life. This post is partly inspired by Blake Butler’s “all the books I read” lists. Thank you Blake. I read around half of these…Tao Lin66 min readTao Lin66 min read
Oct 20, 2020THE CONTEMPORARY (AMERICAN) SHORT STORY, #7419 — Spring 2015 Sarah Lawrence College, MFA program |…THE CONTEMPORARY (AMERICAN) SHORT STORY — Spring 2015 Sarah Lawrence College, MFA program | Tao Lin *This is my syllabus from 2015. View 2012 syllabus for same class here. In this class we will read/discuss/examine stories that are (1) <14,000 words (2) labeled fiction (3) published after ~1960 (4) published…Literatura4 min readLiteratura4 min read
Oct 20, 2020A Message of Unknown PurposeDirected Apparently to the People of 2014 from an Elderly Man in Prison in 2042 That Was Discovered by an Anonymous Source and Has yet to Be Read or Analyzed and Will Now Be Read Aloud Verbatim for the First Time *This was written in 2014 for BBC Radio 4 In 2042, after major worldwide catastrophes in the second and third decades of the 21st century, the world is drastically different. It’s much, much worse and maybe more exciting, depending on who you ask. If you asked me, I would probably…Science Fiction9 min readScience Fiction9 min read
Oct 19, 2020Cho Seung-Hui’s Killing Rampage*This is an essay I wrote and published on my blog in 2007 This essay is in self-contained sections, which I arranged intuitively. It doesn’t have a single message. Its topics of interest include loneliness, sadness, death, good/bad in art, fiction writing, the media, concrete reality, abstraction/imagination. I feel sympathy…Cho Seung Hui18 min readCho Seung Hui18 min read
Jul 7, 2020Molecules and LanguageThe following is the Appendix to Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change. There are ninety to one hundred natural types of atoms on Earth — hydrogen, helium, etc. Most atoms aren’t small, conceptually. Oxygen is made of eight electrons, eight protons, eight neutrons. Atoms automatically, in time, join to form molecules. …Tao Lin7 min readTao Lin7 min read
Mar 30, 2020Happier Atoms Don’t ExistBlack holes torture trees. Turtles and birds get upset at my mom because Chinese-Americans power cities. Divination never happened. I think about suburbs too much. Crying fuses stars: it’s everything. Years later, I believe it never happened. Two shells collide. Yarrow appeared. Conscious spinning is peculiar. Thank you for reading my poem. Read more of my poetry here.Poetry1 min readPoetry1 min read
Dec 27, 2019MKULTRA’s Terminal ExperimentsThis is an updated passage deleted from Trip (2018) because it was somewhat of a non sequitur. This topic is in my next book, Leave Society. I recommend reading Surviving Evil (2014) by Karen Wetmore. This essay serves as a summary of the book, with some analysis. Karen Wetmore was…CIA18 min readCIA18 min read
Jun 14, 2019Funny Ha Ha by Andrew Bujalski*First published in 2017 in the booklet for the Blu-Ray of Funny Ha Ha. Funny Ha Ha is one of my favorite movies. To briefly give you an idea of my movie preferences and the degree of my fondness toward Andrew Bujalski’s first movie, which was filmed in 2002 and…Movies5 min readMovies5 min read
