I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.

He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.

If you didn’t get a Christmas present from me, it’s because I’m waiting till the New Year to buy you East of Underground: Hell Below. (Thanks to Valerie for the tip.)

In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. “You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work,” remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. “There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before.”

This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.

Break into his house when he’s not home. Put truth serum in all of the liquids in his fridge. Make sure you’re around when he drinks something from his fridge. And, uh, don’t drink from there yourself, or you’ll end up telling him that he’s consumed truth serum and the gig’s up.

Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…

Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.

Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.

Only 25 years old, with little more than a high school education, Albert had created the perfect bubble, a hermetically sealed moral universe in which he made the rules and controlled all the variables — and the only code that mattered was the loyalty of his inner circle. He even had an insurance policy, one designed to keep him a step ahead of the federal agents charged with tracking cybercrime: For the past four years, Albert had been working as an informant for the Secret Service, helping federal agents to identify and bust other rogue hackers. His double life as a snitch gave him an inside look at how the feds try to safeguard the nation’s computer data — and reinforced his own sense of superiority. “Psychologically,” his sister later told a judge, “it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall.”

I felt like the outcome of the story was less interesting than the details, but if you’re fascinated by psychology, and crime, and the internet it’s still worth a read.

Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.

In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”

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