Your guide to Charter Amendment DD: Taking redistricting away from L.A. politicians

StudioCanalQueen Elizabeth II’s final co-star, Paddington Bear, is headed back to movie screens this fall, and a new trailer shows footage of the marmalade-munching bear as a baby bruin. The new film, Paddington in Peru, sees the eponymous bear return to the land of his birth to find his Aunt Lucy. When she herself is found to be missing from her retirement home, Paddington and his London hosts, the Brown family, get sucked into a mission to discover the lost city of El Dorado.In one scene, viewers will get a glimpse of Paddington as a baby as he recalls his upbringing with Aunt Lucy.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Special counsel Jack Smith argues in a new court filing that former President Donald Trump is not immune from prosecution for his conduct immediately after the 2020 presidential election.

Some city hotel owners did an about-face to support a City Council plan that critics called a "nuclear bomb" on the lodging industry that would drive up city room rates.

It's time to stop arguing about where to build solar farms on public lands and start doing it. Carefully.

Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski are teammates again.

What do you say to your mother-in-law who is keeping her gay son’s husband a secret from the extended family?

"Drake loved what he did and adored and respected everyone with whom he did it," Deidre Hall said in a statement.

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican challenger Hung Cao clashed on immigration, student loans and mass deportation during their only debate.

MSNBC host Ari Melber spoke with a star witness against former President Trump in his first impeachment, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who revealed he was now supporting Trump.

The “Real Housewives of New York City” star shared several photos with her dad over the years in a post on Instagram announcing the heartbreaking news.

It’s something out of a fantasy book – turret and all. The Children’s Museum of Manhattan unveiled a mesmerizing first look at its plans for an 80,000-square-foot abandoned church on Central Park West, which will become a seven-story “magical castle.” The landmarked building at 361 Central Park West – formerly the century-old First Church of...

Tesla is recalling more than 27,000 Cybertrucks because the rearview camera image may not activate immediately after shifting into reverse, the fifth recall for the vehicle since it went on sale late last year

In the war in Ukraine, the use of a weapon known as a glide bomb is helping Russia to make new gains. Officials say one of those bombs is responsible for a recent attack on an apartment building in Kharkiv. Russia is now occupying around 20% of Ukraine.

Even if the veteran makes it into the Isles' opening night lineup, a message is being sent clear as day.

Authorities in Missouri have identified the skeletal remains of mother Emily Strite who was found in a remote wooded area six months after she mysteriously disappeared.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., says her husband remains trapped inside their North Carolina home without power following Hurricane Helene on Tuesday.

The movie "Mean Girls" came out in 2004 and quickly became a classic. Oct. 3 became associated with the film due to a famous line from the picture.

Russia is relying on new tactics to gain ground in Ukraine, with the continuation of U.S. support uncertain as the war grinds on.

Retailers are ramping up hiring for the holiday season

A Boeing jet with nearly 185 passengers onboard was evacuated in Italy early Thursday after flames were seen shooting from an engine.

The Gallagher brothers will be in NJ on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1.

Ron Hale was best known for his roles on "General Hospital" and "Ryan's Hope."

The Astros didn't get what they paid for.

"People couldn’t get away with that kind of thing so much anymore," the 30-year-old said in a new interview.

Angel Reese apparently owes Shaquille O'Neal after she bet him $100,000 to make a free throw.

In summer 2023, the five were confronted after midnight near a lake by a sergeant major with the Utah National Guard. One said, “We are media,” before they collected their belongings and agreed to leave the area, the FBI said.

Edgar Alejandro knows the challenges of the music industry thanks to his mariachi parents. He's finding his way by blending mariachi, jazz and bossa nova.

The Season 2 finale of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has confirmed what many fans suspected all along about the Stranger.

The forced proximity of lockdown led to a lot of breakups. But it reminded this duo why they chose each other in the first place.

California's workers are struggling. Proposition 32 would give about 2 million of the state’s lowest-paid workers a modest pay raise.

With Lakers training camp underway, there are a few younger players who are going to be worth watching this preseason.

Becky Hammon attempted to dissect what went wrong — and has kept going wrong — for her Aces, and that brought her to a Liberty comparison.

Charli XCX made a pop masterpiece that’s still leaving its mark.

ALL NEW: A surgeon is accused of drugging his girlfriend in order to control her. "48 Hours" contributor Nikki Battiste reports Saturday, Oct. 5 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis. | Courtesy of Lionsgate One mortgaged winery, $136 million budget, several allegations of non-consensual kissing, and a crossdressing Shia LaBeouf later, Megalopolis is finally here — and it appears to be a “mega-flopolis.”  The film, a perplexing, oversaturated modern riff on the waning days of the Roman Republic — if Rome were New York City by way of Baz Luhrmann and Fellini’s Satyricon — made an astoundingly low $4 million over its opening weekend. Though that might speak primarily to the public appetite for a CGI-laden Shakespearean drama without the benefit of Shakespeare, it’s a number likely assisted by the confusion and division surrounding the film. Even for the notably demanding director Francis Ford Coppola, known for intense sets that lead to masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as well as critically acclaimed flops like The Conversation and his musical One From the Heart, Megalopolis has been accompanied by an unusual degree of chaos and controversy. As Coppola has recounted many times, he’s been trying to make Megalopolis for decades, and ultimately wound up financing it by borrowing against his own fortune — a costly risk that may now never pay off.  Yet after all of that hoopla, even the film’s arrival in theaters may not satisfactorily answer the basic question: What even is Megalopolis, anyway? Here’s an attempt to answer that question — though as with all things related to this film, opinions may vary considerably about Megalopolis, what it’s aiming for, and what, if anything, it achieves. Megalopolis is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead with a dash of Inception and a huge helping of theatre camp Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as a futuristic architect named Cesar Catilina. Giancarlo Esposito plays his rival, Cicero, the mayor of New Rome. Cicero’s daughter Julia (Game of Thrones’s Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls for Catilina, waffles between the two (even after Catalina tells the socialite to “go back to the cluuuuub“). She may or may not hold the secret to mastering the “megalon,” a golden glowy element that looks like gold foil but is, we’re told, made of space-time itself. Using megalon, Catilina wants to build a version of New Rome that he dubs an immortal school-city. His vision ultimately turns out to be just a slightly more sci-fi version of the High Line, but it’s apparently enough to usher in the utopia of his dreams. (It also helps that he’s motivated by the memory of his late wife, whose death he may have hastened with his obsessiveness, a la Inception, despite an official ruling of death by suicide.) Also like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, architecture seems to be a metaphor for movie-making — Catilina as a tortured, misunderstood artist who decides to name his son Francis.   Though this basic plot feels swiped from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in execution the story is full of oddities — Driver can stop time, except when he can’t? — and curiosities; at many showings, a live performer interacts with the screen, lip-syncing along with an off-screen figure. Though the all-star cast is huge, many of the characters seem to have very little to do with the plot. They seem to primarily be window-dressing or an excuse for Coppola to cast many members of his own family, ranging from nephew Jason Schwartzman to several young grandchildren. Like Kevin Costner’s Horizon, another $100 million auteur box office failure, Megalopolis features an odd mix of deliberately elevated language and literary allusions: Driver makes his entrance reciting two-thirds of Hamlet’s soliloquy, apparently purely for drama. Julia and her father battle-slash-communicate using Marcus Aurelius quotes.  The story, such as it is, unfolds against a surprisingly lackluster CGI city whose skylines and blurred edges aren’t quite enough to convey the soaring futuristic vision Coppola clearly had in mind. By contrast, the crowded ensemble scenes and orgiastic, wild, decadent party life of the streets (embodied by a woozy Aubrey Plaza sleeping her way to the top) feel so Felliniesque it’s hard to take it as anything but pastiche. Overall, the concept might have worked much better as an anime — it’s less like a fully coherent narrative and more like a fun project for theater kids and their friends who recently got into computer animation.  The making of Megalopolis was as over-the-top as the film itself 2024 brought an onslaught of weird Megalopolis news in the long build-up to the film itself. First, in May, there was a deep-dive Guardian investigation into the production. Timed to coincide with the film’s debut at Cannes, where it was debuting without a distributor, the piece depicted a troubled set.  Numerous anonymous crew members belittled Coppola’s directorial sensibilities and claimed to be baffled by his inability to work well with CGI; at one point, Coppola reportedly told a crew member, “How can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I don’t even know what Megalopolis looks like?” This specific CGI-induced crisis is the kind of thing that many filmmakers angst over (Christopher Nolan again comes to mind), so it isn’t as though the Guardian report alone was enough to cast doubt on the film. However, the report also contained allegations that he behaved inappropriately toward many women on set by making the rounds of the topless women in one elaborate scene and reportedly trying to kiss them. These are allegations Coppola has partially denied, admitting that he kissed the women but denying there was anything untoward — as he was directing, he reportedly announced to the set that “if I come up to you and kiss you, just know it’s solely for my pleasure.” It’s unclear how that statement clarified anything for the actors on set; it doesn’t exactly create the image of a trouble-free production helmed by a focused, clear-sighted director. According to the Guardian, the now-85-year-old auteur would also allegedly smoke weed in his trailer before emerging to announce a brand-new scene to shoot.  Shortly after the Guardian story came the film’s polarized reception at Cannes. Though its director received a wild ovation from an enthusiastic audience made up of many people who were directly involved in the movie (another Horizon parallel), this was countered by critics who called the film, generously, “absolute madness” and “a totally bonkers experiment,” or, less generously, “a head-wrecking abomination” consisting of “138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isn’t there.” Yikes. Finally, in July, we got the trailer, which immediately drew criticism for using quotes from critics about Coppola’s previous works, not about Megalopolis. While audiences were still debating whether this was some sort of intentional meta-commentary, the trailer was quickly recalled by Lionsgate, which apologized sincerely to Coppola for what was apparently a genuine mistake.  All of this led up to the resounding question of what sort of a ride we were in for. Even after the film’s release, that’s still not entirely clear — but it’s definitely anything but boring. What does it all mean?! Coppola has claimed that Megalopolis is an exploration of and a warning about an America on the brink of fascism, but the film, despite its clunky Roman metaphors and heavy-handed satire of the modern media, obfuscates that message in plenty of ways. For starters, Coppola seems to think — and Megalopolis repeatedly seems to imply, however inadvertently — that the greatest risk of fascism comes from the politically correct, insurgent left, rather than from oppressive systems. The film instead seems to view a wealthy upper class as a potentially benevolent force, and Coppola has stated that he deliberately cast “canceled” actors (like LaBeouf) in order to avoid the appearance of being “woke.” LaBeouf plays an opportunistic figure who takes up populist causes for his own manipulative ends, all while intermittently wearing a dress and a rat-tail and cozying up to power; it’s all equal parts boorish and incoherent.  Then there’s Cesar Catilina himself, the nephew of a powerful billionaire (Jon Voigt), who despite nominally claiming to work for the people, pursues power and his vision for the masses with pure Randian entitlement. Despite, or more likely because, of his being named Cesar, the film ultimately endorses his righteousness without any self-reflection. The film ends with Catilina winning his battle with the mayor to usher in the city he wants to build — but his former enemy stands by his side, grandfather to his only son, and the family portrait is accompanied by an overtly creepy chant of schoolchildren pledging to build an America dedicated to education and opportunity. Politically, the message is fully muddled. Beyond that flimsy moral, it’s unclear where Megalopolis’s primary claim to genius rests. Lots and lots of movies have been made about a lone hero lost in a dystopian New York. (The Michael Keaton subgenre alone!) The idea that what the city really needs is a new, futuristic architectural vision isn’t new, either;  it’s the central theme of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis, as well as the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The 1927 silent classic East Side, West Side finds the main character, just as in Megalopolis, monologuing to his starstruck girlfriend about erecting immortal skyscrapers.  Unlike East Side, West Side, however, Megalopolis wasn’t filmed on location in New York, but rather in Atlanta, where Coppola was apparently so dissatisfied with the accommodations that he bought and renovated an entire motel to house his family during filming. The film’s opening weekend box office might barely cover the cost of that purchase. This contradiction is one of many that makes Megalopolis feel, for all the money and time and clear passion that went into it, like a rough draft of a film that needed several more revisions to find a coherent thesis. Despite a number of head-turning ideas and moments of sheer theatricality, the film gives way more often than not to bloat and incoherence. Is it an interesting sort of incoherence? Well, yes, if you enjoy seeing movies ironically, as many people do.  Still, amid all the scandal and CGI, there’s a real sense of sadness here. This may well be Coppola’s last film, so watching it for the lulz probably isn’t what most movie buffs had on their 2024 agenda. 

Baker Mayfield and the Buccaneers (3-1) look to extend their lead in the NFC South when they head to Atlanta on Thursday night for a divisional bout with the Falcons (2-2). 

"There was a real slap in there. There was one..."

The famed musician snagged the 3,078-square-feet West Hollywood pad for a song.

County of Maui and ATF officials held a press conference after releasing the origin and cause report of the deadly Maui wildfire that happened last year.

Ever since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump has professed a unique fondness for a bar chart he credits for saving his life.

An estimated 43.15 million viewers tuned in to the CBS News vice presidential debate.

The New York sports scene is booming, and no matter who your team is, there is no better time to tune in to it all.

Kamel Ahmad Jawad died when a missile blasted his hometown of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon as he was "trying to save innocent lives" and comfort others on Tuesday, according to his daughter, Nadine Jawad.

Former President Trump is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four points in Wisconsin, according to a new poll.

In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.

A long-awaited renovation led to DuVal’s home field being covered with topsoil that contained rocks and broken glass.

Facing a third straight postseason that will begin with a five days off, the Dodgers changed up some things ahead of their Saturday opener.

English tourists dancing after taking laughing gas at a Paris dentist, 1820. The sweet, odorless gas technically called nitrous oxide has many names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even “the atmosphere of heaven.” Nitrous itself has just as many common uses as it does names. Doctors use it as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into brief and largely pain-free dissociative euphorias before having a tooth pulled or dislocated finger yanked straight. Inhaling nitrous gives a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers.   The gas is both legal and widely available. It comes in small pressurized canisters intended for kitchen use; large tanks for heavier applications, like medicine or car engines; or even as the gas that shoots out of whipped cream canisters when there’s no cream left (hence: “whippets”).  Thanks to being both accessible and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for decades, from Grateful Dead concerts in the ’60s to raves in the ’90s. Lockdowns during the Covid pandemic seem to have set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. Today, “People on Nitrous Gas” has its own TikTok discovery tab, with videos racking up millions of views. Celebrities are putting the risks of abuse on display, from Kanye West and SZA, to Steve-O of the stunt show Jackass fame. The Mormon mothers and social media influencers of “MomTok,” whose faith shuns any drug use, recently said that part of the draw of all the Botox they’ve gotten is getting the nitrous first. “It’s a party,” one said. Inhaling nitrous is considered relatively safe for people who don’t use it often and don’t take too much. But there are definitely risks, and more so in recreational contexts. As recreational use rises, particularly among teenagers, those risks are gaining more attention.  The primary one is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without intervention, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage. There’s currently no consensus as to whether nitrous should be labeled an addictive substance. While it doesn’t seem to build the same physical dependency as opioids, it does still carry the risk of habit formation in some cases. And while nitrous doesn’t have a known fatal dose, deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that can happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, where statistics on nitrous are more detailed, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.) But while the rise in using recreational nitrous for its brief highs is prompting new concerns, the drug is actually one of the oldest stories in the Western history of mind-altering substance use.  Through the centuries of up-and-down nitrous use across the US and UK, you find a rich, at times hilarious, trail left by this so-called atmosphere of heaven. Theaters across the US in the early 1800s filled with members of the public, watching volunteers inhale nitrous on stage and provide a delirious form of entertainment for the crowds. Traveling caravans brought nitrous shows on the road. Poets celebrated a new form of pleasure, while philosophers tried nitrous in Harvard laboratories, frantically scribbling down rushes of insight.  The history of nitrous use is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the mind. More specifically, about the value — or rejection — of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today, as the gradual return of legal access to psychedelics is sparking renewed conversation around the potential benefits, and harms, of mind-altering drugs, seeing the many different iterations of nitrous use across history can help us think more expansively about what, if anything, the strange experiences of nitrous mean and what the future of recreational nitrous might look like. “A new pleasure for which language has no name” In late 18th-century industrial Britain, the air was foul. Coal smoke and the odor of feces were abundant. Respiratory diseases were rampant, like tuberculosis, which had come to be known as “the robber of youth.”  The deadly air inspired the founding of the Pneumatic Institution in 1799, a medical facility in Bristol intended to study whether gasses could be used as medicines, too. It was there that the first experiments with nitrous began in earnest. The chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, but dismissed it as toxic. Humphry Davy, a young lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution, had a hunch that Priestley’s discovery had been confused with a chemically similar but highly irritating compound: nitric oxide.  In April, Davy repeated Priestley’s experiment, and wrote to a friend afterward that he had “made a discovery which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,” prefiguring the role of replication in science today. Nitrous oxide, when purely synthesized, was perfectly breathable. Davy then set out to breathe as much as he possibly could. He sealed himself inside a box that was designed to boost the inhalation of gasses. He sat for over an hour while a steady flow of nitrous oxide filled the chamber. When he stepped out, he grabbed a giant silk air-bag full of more nitrous and huffed that too, just for good measure. Then, his mind peeled away from his body, and he “lost touch with all external things,” entering a strange, revelatory world of flashing insights.  That summer, Davy invited dozens of curious writers, physicians, and philosophers to visit the Pneumatic Institute in the late evenings after normal operations had ceased. They all huffed nitrous, experimenting with entirely new regions of the mind. According to historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, nitrous gave Western scientists one of the first chemical means of reliably accessing mystical states of consciousness. Against the banality of our ordinary experience, nitrous delivered a shocking contrast, a state of mind full of unfamiliar pleasures that often carried a sense of insight into the nature of the cosmos. The poet Robert Southey, after his first hit of nitrous, wrote to his brother that “Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” Within a year, however, most who had come to try nitrous lost interest. Its pleasures were new and exciting, but rarely stuck with users once they returned to sobriety after a few minutes. Others who tried the gas just ended up with an upset stomach and the giggles. Davy, who would go on to become president of the Royal Society, stayed with his experiments, eventually producing a hefty book on the chemistry and philosophy of nitrous. He predicted that since nitrous temporarily extinguished pain, it could be useful during surgeries. No form of anesthesia existed yet, so surgeries were very painful, and very dangerous. But the idea failed to gain momentum. Instead, nitrous became something else: entertainment. How nitrous became entertainment, and then medicine Though the early enthusiasm for nitrous fizzled, it was easy enough to produce that, as word got out, chemists learned they could make it in their home laboratories. This turned nitrous into something of a party fixture.    “Maybe it will become the custom for us to inhale laughing gas at the end of a dinner party, instead of drinking champagne,” a young German chemist speculated in 1826, after participating in a garden party where guests enjoyed nitrous under the afternoon sun.  Public nitrous shows began taking place as early as an 1814 lecture series in Philadelphia. First, a doctor gave a discourse on the effects of nitrous to the assembled crowd. Then, a series of young men volunteered to inhale balloons of nitrous onstage, putting on a raucous spectacle. While Davy and his friends had been interested in the mental side of what being on nitrous felt like, these public shows put a spotlight on the uninhibited bodies that the chemical set loose. After inhaling the gas, volunteers would clumsily dance, fight, sing, or even strike up the occasional fencing match. Sometimes, the first row of a theater was kept empty to protect onlookers from the mayhem. “On stage, the subjective experience was incidental,” writes Jay. “The moment of return to waking consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for confused hilarity.”  Soon, nitrous shows were taken on the road, carried by traveling carnivals to new, hooting crowds each night. Volunteers were charged around 25 cents per huff, bringing in good profit for those who’d invested in the necessary gas tanks, tubes, and breathing bags. One traveling nitrous show, put on by Samuel Colt (who would go on to invent the pioneering Colt firearm), dosed roughly 20,000 volunteers from Canada to Maryland.  It was during a show in 1844 that the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, felt no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled. Wells first tried on himself, inhaling nitrous and having another dentist pull his own wisdom tooth. It was a great success: Wells felt no pain, and proclaimed “a new era in tooth pulling.” He successfully performed the procedure on a few of his patients, before convincing a surgeon at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital to let Wells administer the gas during an operation, doubling as a demonstration for a strictly medical audience. It didn’t go well. Nervous in front of a scrupulous crowd, Wells pulled away the nitrous balloon a little too quickly. During the operation, the patient appeared to groan in pain (though it was later deemed an involuntary and unconscious response). Onlookers nevertheless booed Wells out of the theater, and the embarrassment pushed him into a depression that culminated in suicide. But the demonstration inspired Wells’s former partner to try a similar procedure, only with a different substance: a solvent called ether.  After a few successful experiments using ether as an anesthetic, another demonstration was arranged in the same theater where Wells’s had failed. This time, ether was successfully administered as a pain-vanquishing anesthetic, prompting one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the century, as well as a revisitation of Wells’s work with nitrous. The hospital theater was renamed “The Ether Dome,” while anesthetic use of both ether and nitrous began to spread across the country. The next 150 years of nitrous The rise of anesthetics like nitrous in medicine was accompanied by a decline in their use as recreational drugs.  Physicians began to think of nitrous-induced revelations as gibberish, closer to delirium than real insight. Too much interest in their short-lived pleasures, doctors began to write, could pose a public health risk. Recreational anesthetics like nitrous would “delight the animal sensations, while they destroy the moral sentiments; they introduce their victims to a fool’s paradise; they mock them with joys which end in sorrows.” Jay describes the mid-1800s arc of nitrous as a “shift away from subjectivity,” prefiguring the same trajectory across a variety of disciplines, including psychology. Through the middle of the 19th century, nitrous settled into dentistry while falling out of philosophy, with at least one major exception that ultimately proved the rule: the eccentric American philosopher Benjamin Blood.  In 1860, during what he expected to be a very normal visit to the dentist, he awoke from a routine dose of nitrous with the vague sense that he’d glimpsed the essence of all philosophy, the “secret or problem of the world,” as he later wrote.  Blood asked dentists and doctors why their gas had given him a spiritual epiphany. He learned two things. First, that “nearly every hospital and dentist office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anesthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life.” Across the country, patients returning from anesthesia had been asking their doctors something to the effect of, “What does it all mean, or amount to?”  Second, the doctors and the dentists couldn’t care less. Blood received smiles and shrugs, but no explanations. So he spent 14 years reviving the tradition of nitrous self-experimentation, eventually publishing a pamphlet: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. It didn’t get particularly famous, but it did catch the attention of Harvard philosopher William James. Inspired by Blood’s curious writings, James followed Humphry Davy’s old protocol, heating a beaker of ammonium nitrate in the Harvard chemistry laboratory, capturing the escaping gas, and inhaling deeply with pen and paper in hand. His subsequent experience of “intense metaphysical illumination” informed the rest of his life’s work, where he would go on to become known, today, as the father of American psychology.  Meanwhile, innovations in the delivery mechanisms for laughing gas were starting to ramp up its use in dentistry. George Poe, cousin of the poet Edgar Allen Poe, figured out how to manufacture nitrous in liquid form. This allowed for packaging and distributing it in easy-to-use canisters. By 1883, he was supplying 5,000 dentists with canned nitrous oxide across the country.    Once nitrous came in a convenient package, people began finding all sorts of new uses for it. In 1914, American rocketeer Robert Goddard filed a patent suggesting it could work as a rocket propellant, where it’s still used today.  But the innovation that brought nitrous back into style as a contemporary recreational drug was a little more mundane: whipped cream canisters. It turned out that dispensing cream out of a nitrous gas cylinder delivers the perfectly fluffy whipped cream we can so easily buy in grocery stores today. These whipped cream canisters are also where the name “whippets” comes from, and how we’ve landed in the awkward situation of rising nitrous use among teenagers. Nitrous, today and tomorrow In the neighboring arena of psychedelic drugs, many advocates are pushing for wider accessibility to these mind-altering substances. With nitrous, that accessibility is already here, and now, attracting strong criticism. The UK recently reinstated a shade of prohibition, making possession of nitrous oxide for “unlawful use” illegal. You can still use it to dispense whipped cream and other culinary delights, but if you’re just interested in a giggly high, or even seeing whether it might reveal, as Blood thought, the world’s philosophical secret, that’s unlawful. But prohibition inevitably pushes drug use underground, where it’s guaranteed to be riskier and less well-informed than legal, regulated, and educated use. And with a substance like nitrous that has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, there’s an opportunity to work on promoting more responsible forms of use through public education (such as awareness that the gas impairs the body’s ability to take in oxygen, so doing whippets in a tight, closed space is probably not as safe as in a backyard).  Since nitrous-related substance abuse is such a small problem relative to opioids and alcohol, it hasn’t received all that much study. The past few years of data, however, have prompted a new conversation around whether nitrous should be considered addictive. It doesn’t seem to form a physical dependence, like opioids, and has no physical symptoms of withdrawal. But it does seem capable of forming a more psychological form of dependence (dissociative pleasure basically on tap does obviously pose some habit-forming risk), prompting concerns around how exactly to label it. Either way, ensuring support and harm reduction is available to those who need it may prove to be a challenge. But if we can’t figure out how to handle recreational use with nitrous, it’s difficult to imagine how we’d do it in a world where LSD and psilocybin mushrooms become widely available, too.  More broadly, though, set against the long history of different approaches and interpretations of nitrous, our current situation isn’t all that new. Today’s social media spectacles of nitrous use are just digitized versions of the same nitrous shows from the 1800s. Back then, some people believed that wild behaviors while on nitrous revealed “the volatility of the democratic masses.” What might it say about our own cultural moment that recreational nitrous use is returning as a sort of performative delirium?  As far as the philosophy of nitrous goes, I imagine curious experimenters today are working with different substances, like extended DMT. Maybe someone like Benjamin Blood will come along and make the case that we still have much to learn from nitrous. Maybe dentists will begin to read up on metaphysics and begin engaging with their woozy patients rather than dismissing their experiences.  Or, maybe nothing much will happen with nitrous. The social media hype will die down as new drugs take its place, and it will sink back into relative obscurity, propelling rockets and numbing minor surgeries, inspiring the occasional dorm-room conversation about God and the nature of pleasure. At the very least, as its long history shows, nitrous will always remain capable of giving us a great story.