The Social Life of Psychedelics | Psychedelics & Rave Utopias
Date and Time
Location
Psychedelics in Society & Culture | Initiative-Supported Event
Speakers: Emily Witt (The New Yorker) & Michelle Lhooq (Rave New World)
About the Event
The rave, like every era of psychedelic counterculture, has long presented a hopeful vision of technofuturism. In 2026, the drugs are weird, the phones are out, the politics are oppressive, and machine-made music is becoming self-generating. Can the rave still offer us a periscope out of the slop era - or has the portal permanently closed? Journalists Emily Witt and Michelle Lhooq look at the past, present, and collapsing future of rave utopianism.
About the Speakers
Michelle Lhooq is an independent journalist and chronicler of the radical underground. She writes gonzo dispatches from the global frontiers of psychedelics and rave scenes in her newsletter, Rave New World—tracking how counterculture is evolving in an era of major paradigm shifts, rising authoritarianism, and algorithmic hegemony. Previously, she was a features editor at VICE covering electronic music, and a contributing editor reporting on psychedelic news and culture at DoubleBlind magazine. Lhooq's work is interested in liminality, communal modes of resistance, new drug trends, and the politics of pleasure; previous stories include a post-colonial history of Goa trance, the science of GMO weed, climate protestors at Burning Man, and a post-cringe theory of psychedelic spirituality. She is the author of Weed: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask, and her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times, and GQ.
Emily Witt has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018. She has covered breaking news and politics from around the country, and has written about culture, sexuality, drugs, and night life. She is the author of the books Future Sex, Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire, and Health and Safety, which received the Los Angeles Times’ 2025 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. She has reported from many countries and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique.
This event is part of the Social Life of Psychedelics talk series.
What do psychedelics reveal about the people and culture who work with them?
Psychedelics shape society, politics, religions, law, music, or medicine. They gain their power not just from their psychopharmacology, but from the many ways that people use them: to influence others, form relationships and identities, negotiate hierarchies, imagine futures, and create transformative social worlds. This talk series will use psychedelics as a probe to consider the assumptions, desires, and imaginations of cultural ecosystems.
Social Life of Psychedelics talks will take place every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the spring 2026 semester in the Thompson Room (Barker Center 110). Contact Amadeus Harte with any questions.
