Steven Kotler

Sympathy for the Devil

Steven Kotler
The road to the future is paved in blood — my own. Not too long ago, a nurse went a little crazy with my hemoglobin. Somewhere in the middle of the second vial, I got too dizzy to pay attention, but it felt like she took pints, quarts, gallons, whatever......

Dr. Thompson, I Presume

Steven Kotler
In 1990, I moved to Aspen, Colorado, knowing nothing about the place other than the skiing was supposed to be good and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was supposed to live nearby. That was reason enough for me. I got a job bartending at the Hotel Jerome, the four-star dorm for......

7-Up Up and Away

Steven Kotler
Photo by AP/WideWorld There was a time, not too long ago, when people spoke of NASA in the same reverential tones now reserved for black-hole theorists, molecular geneticists and Radiohead. But over the past 30 years, in a small but growing subset of the aerospace community, NASA’s intellectual hegemony first......
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A Life of Letters

Steven Kotler
Photo by Reid Yalom Joe Loya had it rough. He was a bookish kid growing up in the East Los Angeles Maravilla housing project, and he suffered through a violent, peripatetic youth — his family moved from Pico Rivera to Montebello to Burbank. After his mother died when he was......

Where’s the Beef?

Steven Kotler
Photo by Meredith Heuer/Photonivca I was in New Zealand recently and met an old German couple in Queenstown. We conversed in some mangle of English and German. When I told them I was from California, we had something like the following exchange: “California ist very lickable . . . Ex-zupt......

Have Your Planet and Hummer, Too

Steven Kotler
During the gubernatorial recall election, under pressure from opponent Arianna Huffington, Arnold Schwarzenegger promised to convert one of his Hummers to hydrogen as soon as the technology was possible. Over in the sleepy little ski town of Sandy, Utah, Tai Robinson, 29, heard Schwarzenegger’s promise and took it as a......
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Moving Into the Future

Steven Kotler
Photos by Debra DiPaolo Architect Jennifer Siegal has spent much of her adult life thinking about the great housing crunch. The first thing you see when you walk into her Office of Mobile Design, in a converted Venice warehouse, is a huge poster depicting her sleek and modern “Portable House,”......
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Oh So Natural

Steven Kotler
Photo by Noah Berger For a long time there have been two paramount arguments against homosexuality. The first came from the Bible. The King James Version of Leviticus 18:22 is quite clear: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: It is abomination.” Then again, in that same Bible,......

Watching the Detectives

Steven Kotler
Call it the revenge of the nerds if you like, but while Homeland Security pumps Big Brother full of steroids, unlikely heroes in the form of MIT and Johns Hopkins University scientists are starting to fight back. The tension between the government and the scientific community began when the Bush......

Under My Tongue

Steven Kotler
Illustrations by Daniel Peacock For almost as long as people have been chasing the dragon, people have been trying to slay it as well. The list of heroin-addiction cures comes in all forms. Urban legend says light-bulb inventor Thomas Alva Edison came up with a multispiced detox wonder called either......