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Round Up: Every Switch 1 & 2 Announcement From Summer Game Fest's Weekend Showcases
Stacked showcases
PrideFest celebrated in downtown Athens with parade, more
Pridefest was held in downtown Athens on Saturday, June 6, 2026. The annual event included a parade, live entertainment and local vendors.
Paul Jr.’s American Motor Fest Set to Bring Major Entertainment Weekend to Clearfield County
CLEARFIELD — Engines will roar, music will fill the air, and thousands of visitors are expected to descend upon the
Thousands of women gather for Kaiser fitness festival in Sacramento
Thousands of women gathered Sunday morning in Sacramento for a women's fitness festival hosted by Kaiser Permanente that was focused on health, wellness and community.
Entertainment Notebook: Fringe Festival Underway; Kings of Coke & The Blind Couple from Mali
The 2026 Montreal Fringe Festival is officially underway, continuing until June 21.
Is Macau Outperformance And Community Investment Altering The Investment Case For Melco Resorts & Entertainment (MLCO)?
In the first quarter of 2026, Melco Resorts & Entertainment’s Macau properties generated 87% of group gross gaming revenue and 75% of EBITDA, with both metrics expanding year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter alongside a 1.3 percentage point gain in Macau gross gaming revenue market share. This outperformance in Macau, coupled with Melco’s ongoing support for inclusion-focused events such as the 2026 Inclusion Conference & Festival and the Macau Golf Masters, highlights how operational strength...
Six Flags Great Adventure's summer additions show the park is investing beyond rides
Six Flags Great Adventure's new summer lineup has A Great Day Parade, Boardwalk Nights, DC Heroes & Villains Fest, and more.
Corey Ave. Art & Craft Festival helps passion projects thrive as full-time businesses
Along Corey Avenue in St. Pete Beach, tents lined the street, artwork filled display booths, and business owners shared more than just products with customers.
Veganfest highlights plant-based living, sustainability and local businesses
Pack Square Park celebrated all things green at Veganfest.
Boat Float 'n’ Folk Festival returns to Chittenango
The Boat Float n’ Folk Festival returns June 13 to the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum with paddling, music and history.
Carolina Country Music Fest boosts vendors’ business
The Carolina Country Music Festival isn’t just drawing thousands of fans to Myrtle Beach — it’s also creating a major weekend opportunity for vendors
Xbox Fans Go Wild As Asha Sharma Gives Free Consoles To Everyone At FanFest LA
Watch the reaction here
Fallout 76 | Join Fallout 76’s P.R.O.T.E.C.T. Protocol for rewards!
Login daily for FREE* rewards from June 7 - June 15! Clear out Infestations to support the Community Challenge and help unlock the Brotherhood Protector Power Armor.
Xbox Games Showcase 2026: All the news and trailers
Microsoft wraps up Summer Game Fest with its annual gaming showcase.
Tribeca 2026 After Hours: A Guide to the Fest’s Best After Parties and Events
As New York City braces for a stretch of 80-degree days this week, Tribeca’s 25th anniversary edition is also bringing some serious heat to New York’s after-hours circuit. Running June 3-14, this year...
Bellevue-based T-Mobile wants to sell a lifestyle, not just wireless
The second-largest U.S. carrier's distinctive marketing strategy offers exclusive access and perks that aren't typically associated with wireless service.
Tons of new Final Fantasy 7 Revelation details
A truckload of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation details have come in following this week’s announcement. After two entries in the Final Fantasy 7 remake series, Square Enix will finally end the trilogy next year. Denfaminico Gamer caught up with Naoki Hamaguchi after the reveal at Summer Game Fest and managed to get a bunch of new information. Hamaguchi touched on...
Ultrawealthy clients pay me $150,000 a year to manage their lifestyle
Roman & Erica charge their clients $150,000 to plan all aspects of their leisure and social lives and be available for requests 24/7.
Newport Italianfest return's to city's Festival Park June 11-14 with full slate of food, fun and family entertainment
One of Northern Kentucky’s most anticipated summer traditions will return to Newport Festival Park from June 11-14, as Newport Italianfest takes kicks off four days of Italian food, live entertainment and family-friendly activities to the riverfront. Located along Riverboat Row between the Purple People Bridge and the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, Italianfest attracts more than 120,000 visitors...
Things to do in Cincinnati this week, June 8-14
If you're looking for the best events happening in Cincinnati, you're at the right place. Find your next concert, game, festival or family event.
Alan S King
Scope of work: King chairs the firm’s national labor and employment practice, advising Fortune 500 companies, municipalities and minority-owned businesses in employment litigation. He also serves as first deputy general counsel and is a certified mediator and arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association.Significant case: He secured victories for employers, including United Airlines and Michigan TV station WZZM, winning summary judgment in discrimination and retaliation claims.Other contributions: King is president of the board of Children First Fund, supporting Chicago Public Schools, and is a producer of the Chosen Few Picnic & Festival.
Memphis Pride Festival celebrates 50 years of LGBTQ advocacy
The city of Memphis celebrated Pride Month this weekend with thousands attending the 51st annual Memphis Pride Festival.
Quad Cities Pride Festival draws hundreds to celebrate community and inclusion
Several people gathered at Schwiebert Riverfront Park this weekend for the 2026 Quad Cities Pride Festival, a two-day celebration of community, inclusion, and LGBTQ+ pride.
Gallery: Carolina Country Music Fest draws crowds for another year in Myrtle Beach
Locals and visitors alike had their cowboy hats and country music vibes ready to roll on Saturday, June 6, as the Carolina Country Music Fest action took place in Myrtle Beach.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation: 22 New Screenshots Showcasing Its World, Combat, And More
It’s hard to believe, but after almost a decade, the Unknown Journey will conclude in Final Fantasy Revelation next year. Officially shown off at Summer Game Fest Live this week, Revelation is shaping up to be an exciting conclusion to the Final Fantasy 7 Remake saga, as well as a good-looking game on top of...
Madonna Greets Adoring Tribeca Festival Crowd With Tales Of Clubbing, Cinephilia & Emotional NYC Return
Deadline and other entertainment outlets routinely publish minute-by-minute accounts of film festival standing ovations. On Friday at the Tribeca Festival, Madonna’s appearance at a world premiere dre...
PHOTOS: Dayton Pride returns with parade, festival downtown
Dayton’s Pride celebrations are underway downtown. Today’s events include a parade and festival with live entertainment, vendors and food.
io9's Favorite Summer Game Fest 2026 Trailers
The Summer Game Fest showcase has come and gone for 2026, so we've put down our favorite trailers of the giant lot.
Colman Domingo to be guest on first-ever live Awardist podcast recording at Tribeca Film Festival
From 'The Four Seasons' and 'Euphoria,' to 'Disclosure Day' and 'Michael,' Colman Domingo will chat about his incredible career as the guest for EW's first-ever live recording of 'The Awardist' podcast at Tribeca.
Things to do in the Loveland area on Saturday: Nearly every NoCo community has a festival happening
Nearly every town in Northern Colorado has a festival happening on Saturday, including Bluegrass & Brews Festival and the Colorado Medieval Festival in Loveland, Berthoud Day, Johnstown BBQ Day, Fort Collins Pride 2026 and FoCo EcoFest…
FIFA Fan Festival Unveils Entertainment Schedule
Organizers of the FIFA Fan Festival Los Angeles announced Friday a lineup of live music, match broadcasts and cultural programming for a four-day celebration surrounding the start of the World Cup 2026. The festival, scheduled for June 11-14 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, will feature public watch parties for World Cup matches, musical performances, […]
Day of the Devs 2026 - everything announced in the big Summer Game Fest indie showcase
Summer Game Fest's glitzy flagship showcase might be over for another year, but that doesn't mean we're done just yet -…
Capcom Shines Bright With Massive Reveals at Summer Game Fest 2026
'Resident Evil Veronica' announcement, 'Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance', and who to look out for in 'Street Fighter 6' Year 4.
Stellar Blade Follow-Up Blood Rain Announced, Trailer Has Some Eye-Opening Moments
This year’s Summer Games Fest brought a surprise in the form of a reveal of the next game from Stellar Blade developer Shift Up much sooner than. The game is Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and looks to continue on the high octane action delivered by the highly popular 2024 game. The game revealed in a...
Stellar Blade Bloodrain Revealed With Debut Trailer
Shift Up has announced Stellar Blade 2 alongside a debut trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026.
Assassin's Creed Co-Creator Re-Reveals 1666 Amsterdam, 30-Minute Demo Playable Now
Once-abandoned historical action adventure 1666 Amsterdam has been re-announced at Summer Game Fest by Assassin's Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets.
Guild Wars 3, Modern Evolution of the MMORPG, Announced at Summer Game Fest for PC and PlayStation 5
/PRNewswire/ -- Critically-acclaimed game development studio ArenaNet® tonight announced Guild Wars 3™, the third entry in the legendary and beloved Guild...
Guild Wars 3, Modern Evolution of the MMORPG, Announced at Summer Game Fest for PC and PlayStation 5
/CNW/ -- Critically-acclaimed game development studio ArenaNet® tonight announced Guild Wars 3™, the third entry in the legendary and beloved Guild Wars®...
Mighty Cuphead Adventure announced, new Cuphead game on the way
At Summer Game Fest 2026 today, Studio MDHR revealed that it’s working on a brand new Cuphead game and Mighty Cuphead Adventure is set to be released. Mighty Cuphead Adventure is an 8-bit action platformer being made by a small team at Studio MDHR. The announcement notes that “this game goes beyond just taking inspiration from the classics of the...
Resident Evil Veronica Announced, Coming 2027
Capcom has revealed a Resident Evil: Code Veronica remake, delighting fans of the franchise watching this year's Summer Game Fest livestream.
Every Xbox and PC game shown during Summer Game Fest 2026 — announcements, reveals, trailers, gameplay, and more
Xbox and PC players, here's an overview of everything Summer Game Fest 2026 had in store for you.
Tifa Lockhart, Bosch, Yasmine and Arjun announced for Street Fighter 6 Season 4
Street Fighter 6 is currently celebrating its third anniversary this week, and we now can see what the future of the game is going to hold for the next year.During the Summer Game Fest 2026 showcase today, Capcom announced ...
Festa Italiana brings packed entertainment lineup to Lodi
Festa Italiana returns to Lodi for its 12th year on Sunday. Here's what to know before you go.
This viral NYC World Cup festival brings Africa’s biggest stars to Brooklyn
As New York prepares for one of the busiest weekends of the summer with FIFA World Cup festivities set to draw visitors from around the globe, a
E-bike safety; lung cancer treatment and prevention; keeping CMA Festival attendees safe; plus other stories with Vanderbilt Health sources
WKRN News 2 interviewed Jeffrey Upperman, MD, FACS, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatric Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, about e-bike related injuries following the recent death of a Brentwood High student and a proposal to require safety training before students could ride a bike on a school campus in Williamson County. Fabien Maldonado, MD, MSc,Professor of Medicine and Thoracic Surgery, was on WTVF News Channel 5‘s live studio show, “Openline,” with host Ben Hall, to discuss lung cancer, treatment and prevention. WSMV’s “Today In Nashville” program hosted Vanderbilt LifeFlight paramedic/flight nurse practitioner Tony Smith to talk about safety for the CMA Festival. The New York Times reporter Carl Zimmer interviewed James Crowe, MD, Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Antibody Therapeutics, for a story about the race to find vaccines and treatments as Ebola spreads. The Vanderbilt Health News release about the pilot clinical trial conducted by Vanderbilt Health and Cumberland Pharmaceuticals Inc., that confirms the safety of ifetroban and supports the further development of the drug to prevent cancer metastasis, was picked up by Reuters, Stock Titan,and others. Women We Admire has named Lee Ann Liska, President and Chief Operating Officer, to its list of top women leaders of Nashville for 2026. Radiology Business, Aunt Minnie, Bioengineer, and Imaging Technology News covered the study from Consuelo Wilkins, MD, MSCI, the Mildred Thornton Stahlman Professor in Rural Health and professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, that found Black and Hispanic people, while known to be far more apt to have dementia, are significantly less apt than other racial and ethnic groups to show Alzheimer’s pathology on brain scans. STAT News interviewed Deva Sharma, MD, Transfusion Medicine & Hematology-Oncology, for a story about more patients requesting unvaccinated blood and what it means for the medical system at large. Yahoo! Health reporter Korin Miller interviewed Gitanjali Srivastava, MD, Director of Obesity Medicine, for a story about how semaglutide and tirzepatide compare. William Schaffner, MD, Professor of Preventive Medicine, was quoted by several news outlets about public health issues, including: NBC News (new COVID vaccinations); Medscape (pneumonia and sepsis); and CNN (protection from contagious viruses). Shelbyville Times-Gazette is repurposing Jessica Pasley’s July 2025 Vanderbilt Health News story on tick-borne illnesses as a front-page story.
Louisiana Peach Festival: The Science Guys to be featured in Kids Alley at the 46th Annual LA Peach Festival
RUSTON, La. (KTVE/KARD) — KTVE’s Jayden Maloney joins the Science Guys for an exciting science experiment ahead of their appearance in Kids Alley at the 46th Annual Louisiana Peach Fest…
Things to do in the Loveland area on Friday: Bluegrass & Brews Festival, Colorado Medieval Fest and more
The Bluegrass & Brews Festival and Colorado Medieval Fest will be in Loveland on Friday, along with many more entertainment offerings.
How Did Summer Game Fest 2025's Biggest Games Do
Resident Evil Requiem and 007 Last Light were big hits while MindsEye and Splitgate 2 were not
Summer Game Fest 2026 live report - all the news and announcements from Geoff Keighley's E3 but not E3 showcase
The big one, in every sense of the word. It's the main showcase of the summer gaming festivities and the longest one. We're covering it live.
Cost and politics have some of the biggest World Cup fans skipping this year's tournament
The 2026 World Cup has drawn intense criticism from globe-trotting fans who over the years have helped define the tournament's festive atmosphere.
Pearisburg Festival in the Park returns for 41st year with rides, music and free entertainment
HOMETOWN ENTERTAINMENT: Live music, wine festival and historical play
Live music and wine festival among local events happening this weekend
DPH Hosts Fourth Annual Advancing Healthy Lifestyles Conference
DOVER, DEL. (June 4, 2026) — The Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Obesity Prevention Program (PANO) of the Delaware Division of Public Health (DPH) brought together hundreds of leaders, advocates, and practitioners for its fourth annual Advancing Healthy Lifestyles Conference, on June 4, at the Bally’s Dover Casino Resort. It was a full day focused on […]
Entertainment: A Weekend of Festivals and Parades
Including PrideFest, Metal Fest, Highland Games and Fiesta Puerto Rico.
What To Expect From Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest 2026 Showcase
The only confirmed reveal so far is Miss Piggy
ID@XBOX Indie Selects Demo Fest Is Here!
The latest ID@XBOX Indie Selects Demo Fest is live today, with 18 newly announced games included. See them all inside.
Xbox Demo Fest Now Live, 40+ Games Available To Play For Free
The 2026 version of this event has begun!
Xbox Demo Fest Now Live, 30+ Games Available To Play For Free
The 2026 version of this event has begun!
A study of 8,300 older adults revealed a surprising salt habit
A large study of older adults in Brazil found that adding extra salt at the table is still a common habit, especially among men. While too much salt is linked to serious health problems and faster cognitive decline, researchers discovered that women’s salt-shaking habits were tied more closely to lifestyle and diet.
Great Food, Entertainment: GreekFest Underway Now Through Saturday - News-Talk 1480 WHBC
CANTON, Ohio (News Talk 1480 WHBC) – There’s a lot of pride in the Greek tradition that...
All Confirmed & Rumored Games For Summer Game Fest 2026
Summer Game Fest is almost here, so let's dive into which games will feature during the showcase, confirmed or otherwise.
What happens at a longevity festival?
What happens at a longevity festival? On this week's STATus Report, Alex Hogan gets a dispatch from STAT's Sarah Todd.
43rd annual Taste of Buffalo announces wide-ranging, talent-packed entertainment lineup
The Taste of Buffalo presented by Tops Friendly Markets announced more than 20 local artists performing as part of this year's entertainment lineup for the 43rd celebration of the annual food festival. The event will be held along Delaware Avenue and Niagara Square on July 11-12.
Free Summer Concert Series Returns to Downtown Rome This Season
Live music and summer festivities are returning to downtown Rome with the Gigs on the Green concert series.
CMA Fest puts spotlight on Music Row's mental health work
Potentially life-saving work is taking place backstage at CMA Fest.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
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Recently I published a piece about beer, politics, and the question of who speaks up and who doesn’t. I meant every word of it. I still do. And then my inbox opened up. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe I’ve been writing about beer since 2014. For most of that time, I kept things deliberately light — taproom profiles, new releases, the people behind the pints. Gradually, over years of building this thing, you gave me something I didn’t expect: permission. Permission to go deeper. To say what I actually saw in this industry and what I actually believed about it. That trust isn’t something I take lightly. It’s why that piece existed at all, and it’s why this one does too. I’m not walking anything back. But I want to go further. In that piece, I wrote that beer has never existed outside the system. That immigration policy affects who staffs breweries and harvests ingredients. That labor policy affects taproom workers. That civil rights policy affects who feels safe walking into a taproom. That “beer does not exist in a vacuum. The idea that it does is comforting. It is also false.” I believe that as much now as I did when I wrote it. But one idea came back at me, in different forms, over and over (from reader emails, comments, and conversations): that beer itself isn’t political — that it only becomes political when someone decides to make it that way. That what we’re really seeing is a choice by individuals to inject division into something that doesn’t inherently require it. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also wrong — and I think it’s worth being precise about why. That framing assumes that breweries operate outside the conditions shaping everything else. That politics is something you choose to bring into a room that was, until then, clean and neutral. That if you stay quiet, you stay clear of it. But the room was never neutral. It was never clean. Politics is already in the room. It’s in who walks through the door comfortably and who hesitates. It’s in whether a space can be used for organizing without fear. It’s in whether helping someone quietly might carry consequences you have to think carefully about in advance. It’s in who staffed the brewery, who harvested the grain, who can afford to be a regular. The idea that you opt out of all that by staying quiet is an illusion. You only change how visible your response to it is. This is, I realize, a hard thing to hear if you came to a beer newsletter for something lighter. I wrote recently that “beer, for me, has always felt like a refuge — a third place in an increasingly fractured world.” I meant that. I still do. But a refuge is not an escape from reality. It’s a place to gather strength to face it. Here’s what I actually missed — and what I want to correct. Multiple people in the industry reached out to me. I’m not naming them and I’m not identifying their businesses, because that’s not my call. If and when they want to be loud about what they’re doing, that agency belongs to them. What I can share is the substance of what they said, because it complicated something I presented too cleanly. The overall message: *You don’t know what we all are doing.* And they’re right. I don’t. One example involved a collaboration brewed quietly to support another business facing serious challenges in a whole different region, with proceeds directed toward solidarity, community, and keeping operations afloat. No announcement. It could have been broadcast widely. The point was never publicity. Another example involved logistical support for community efforts: organizing safe transportation, providing space for meetings on otherwise closed days, facilitating gatherings under difficult conditions. All of it happening while balancing real financial pressure and genuine concern for personal safety. None of what they described is a brewer “deciding to make beer political.” It’s people responding to the conditions around them — conditions that are already shaping who feels safe, who has access, who can gather, who needs help, and who has the capacity to offer it. Politics, again, already in the room. Already shaping choices. Whether anyone announced it or not. I’ve spent decades in taprooms, at barrel releases, at festivals, in back offices and brewing floors, talking to the people who built this industry from nothing. I know how much happens that never makes it onto social media. I know the owner who quietly comp’d a tab for someone having a crisis. The brewer who drove an hour to pick up a stranger who needed a safe ride. The taproom that stayed dark on a Tuesday so a community group could use the space without it becoming A Whole Thing. None of that gets a post. Most of it never will. So when I wrote recently about silence — when I said that “silence right now doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like complicity” — I was writing about what I could see. And I was right about what I saw. The public silence of breweries that have the platform, the stability, and frankly the safety to say something and choose not to? That still troubles me. I’m not softening that. But some of what I read as silence is actually something else entirely. It’s people doing the work with their hands instead of their phones. It’s people who are genuinely afraid — not of being canceled, but of real consequences for their families, their employees, their ability to keep the doors open at all. That deserves more than a footnote. It deserves to be named clearly. Here’s the tension I want to sit with honestly: public statements matter. They matter because people can’t rally around something they can’t see. Visibility creates awareness and solidarity. It helps people find each other. It tells someone standing outside your taproom door, uncertain whether they’ll be welcomed inside, something they need to know — or whether it’s even safe for them to be in public at all. That’s not performative. I wrote recently that the craft beer movement “was built on collective defiance. It was built on rejecting consolidation. On pushing back against homogeneity.” I believe that too. And I’ll extend it: breweries should be at least as loud about their values as they are when they drop a new seasonal. Your hazy IPA gets a full rollout — the label art, the tap handle photo, the countdown post. Human dignity deserves the same energy. Be as loud about human rights as you are about your beer. There is no reason those two things should require different levels of courage from you. But visibility isn’t the only form of courage. And not everyone can be visible right now without real consequences — financial, personal, sometimes physical. There are people in this industry doing hard, unglamorous, sometimes risky work in the background, and announcing it would compromise it or paint a target on someone who’s already stretched thin. That’s not silence as complicity. That’s operational discipline under pressure. What I want to push back on — clearly, not gently — is the idea that behind-the-scenes action and public visibility are in competition with each other. The person organizing quietly in the back room and the person posting a statement of solidarity on a Tuesday morning are both doing something real. We need both. We need the quiet infrastructure and we need the visible signal. We need people to know that this industry — at its best, at its most independent, and human — gives a fuck. I closed that piece with a question: “Reactive and fearful? Or clear and values-driven?” That question still stands. But having heard from you, I’d add a corollary: the values-driven path isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s a phone call and a recipe. Sometimes it’s a room made available on a closed Tuesday. Sometimes it’s a drive across town for someone who needed a safe ride home. All of it is political. All of it was always political. You don’t get to opt out of that — you only get to decide what you do with it. I’ve spent more than a decade writing about this industry because I believe it can be exactly that. I’ve been lucky enough to build an audience that lets me say so plainly. That’s a privilege I intend to use. The work is happening. Some of it you’ll see. Some of it you won’t. Support it either way. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication covering beer and brewing across New York state. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
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