Samantha Basalari

“When workers are asked, in interviews, what they think of the students, they invariably refer to them as "our future bosses," and say they hope this experience will make better chefs of them than their fathers have been. French Revolution all for nothing?”
― Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews

“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

“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