John Kaag revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story "The Celestial Railroad" to explore how Transcendentalism’s soaring ideals could drift into comfortable illusions—and how figures like Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and a changed Ralph Waldo...
Lawrence Buell reflects on a lifetime of reading Emerson and Thoreau, arguing that Transcendentalism is a philosophy of continual self-renewal, calling us at every age to resist conformity, sustain vision, and imagine the world otherwise.
This essay assesses the ritual function of psychedelic intention-setting ceremonies, using ethnographic data from Burning Man 2023. The piece argues that intention settings are rites of separation that symbolically sacralize the trip for participants.