Samantha Basalari

“These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“My confidence in telling this story gradually returned, and after a month I could write again; you can judge how well that's going, but at least it's going.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“In a famous experiment conducted by NASA in the 1990s, researchers fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to see how they would affect their web-making skills. The caffeinated spider spun a strangely cubist and utterly ineffective web, with oblique angles, openings big enough to let small birds through, and completely lacking in symmetry or a center. (The web was far more fanciful than the ones spun by spiders given cannabis or LSD.)”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“I used to worry about being more efficient. Now, I think, 'Why? What is velocity, and why is that the ultimate value of everything?' The process is really messy, but it's so fun--and you discover weird things that you can only get from just meandering through stuff.”
― Dana Spiotta