In the meantime, Bruce Barcott and I cover his book WEED THE PEOPLE one final time. In this third interview, we discuss the continued rollout of legal cannabis across the states and now the wold. We get into Barcott’s idea of what the future of cannabis looks like, and then talk extensively about his time in magazine and alt-weekly journalism. Barcott saw time in the newsrooms of Outside Magazine, The Village Voice, Harpers and The Seattle Weekly. He also wrote freelance pieces for all the heavy hitters in the national media space in the 90s and 00s - and he’s got a few stories to tell. Magazine journalism is barely a viable business anymore and the effects of that on society are real - a thread that Barcott and I tug on a bit in this episode.

Thanks for listening to Author’s Note. Please make sure you are subscribed so that you are the first to know when we publish a new set of interview in the coming months. My name is Riley Morton, and all our music is by Colin Lake.

Sure, Barcott covers the business of cannabis and the political and legal issues involved, but he’s highly attuned to cultural shifts as well. Weed has had an important role in America’s counterculture for most of the last century. What happens when you take a substance that used to signal sticking it to The Man, and turn it into a $30B industry? What happens when teenagers are no longer taught that smoking a joint will turn you into a hopeless drug addict? What happens when lower Manhattan smells like a Reggae concert?

The implications of legalization are large, but not always obvious. Barcott helps us contextualize all these changes in this episode, and next weeks as well. So stay tuned ;)

music is by Colin Lake

Well researched and immediate, the book is a total pleasure to read, whatever your interest in the subject. You’ll get a sense of that in our wide ranging discussion on the many implications of legal cannabis. So many questions that we had in 2012 are coming into focus: “where is it acceptable to consume cannabis and where is it not?” “Do we have to worry about stoned drivers?” “How do we talk about this with our kids?” So its amazing to spend a few hours with Barcott who has done so much thinking and writing on the subject, first in WEED THE PEOPLE, and then as editor of Leafly for 7 years.

We also get a bit more meta on the great questions in life - questions like ‘how to live’

Thanks for listening to Author’s Note. All the music on the show is by Colin Lake.

In this wide ranging conversation, Lyanda explains why anthropomorphizing animals gets a bad rap in modern science, and how she sees that to be in conflict with her version of naturalism. We also get into death, both human and corvid, and just what it is that humans might occasionally give back to animals.

Author’s Note is for fans of non fiction. Thanks for listening.

Lyanda has built an incredible career as a modern urban naturalist, writing 6 fascinating books in this category. I’ve known her for years, and was happy to finally convince her to spend 3 sessions talking about the book that was a turning point early in her career: Crow Planet. Here, we talk about the origin of the book and how she crafts a book in this unique style.

All the music on the show is by Colin Lake.

Next week, we’ll feature the first of 3 interviews with Lyanda Haupt about her book Crow Planet. She’s an incredibly attuned naturalist and talented writer, and you won’t want to miss these episodes. So please subscribe to Author’s Note.

All the music on the show is by Colin Lake. Thanks for listening. https://substack.com/@rileymorton

We also get into what it was like to read negative reviews in the press, and even an entire book length refutation of Sex at Dawn.

Chris talks about how important his father’s influence was on his writing, and the irony of all of Chris’s research about non monogamy in humans being the result of his parents very long and very successful monogamous relationship.

If you like what you are hearing, please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice, or recommend the show to a friend or two. Thanks for listening!

As you might know from his podcast, Tangentially Speaking, Chris is a great storyteller, and has a nimble brain - so our conversation is wide ranging.

All the music on Authors Note is by Colin Lake. www.colinlake.com

We also talk about the recent changes at Outside Magazine. Earlier this year, after the sale of Outside to a company that is hoping to turn the brand into more of a tech company, 35 of Outside’s previous editors, writers and photographers sent a letter to the new ownership, asking to have their names removed from the masthead. Tim Cahill was one of the signatories, and he’ll tell us why in this episode. We’ll get to further unpack the difficulties of magazine publishing as a business in the current era, and talk about how travel has changed as well - questions like: was it the internet or smartphones that killed adventure travel?

Here is my 2nd of 3 conversations with Tim Cahill about , JAGUARS RIPPED MY FLESH discussing the process of releasing the book, doing press for it, what came next for his career at OUTSIDE and beyond.

Tune in next week for the last of our 3 conversations with Tim, and then we’ve got 3 episodes with the always interesting Christopher Ryan, host of the podcast Tangentially Speaking about his first book, SEX AT DAWN.

Future guests include Lyanda Haupt about her book CROW PLANET and Bruce Barcott about WEED THE PEOPLE.