‘We’re Functioning In a World of Artifice’:
Will Solomon interviews Mitch Horowitz about parapsychology, skepticism, the death of materialism, and only way we’ll fix social media
A literary and social journal commissioned writer Will Solomon to conduct a q-and-a interview with me. As though heralding a point made in the piece — “we still live at a juncture where evidence for extraphysicality cannot be spoken of within most of mainstream letters” — the editors first ghosted the writer and then canceled his article, albeit with a kill fee — and without explanation. Will’s piece, provided in full here, highlights the uncertain place we occupy as the philosophy of materialism, which still dominates mainstream humanities, suffers intellectual demise without a new consensus-reality replacing it, a topic to which Will alludes in his introduction and which is further explored in my upcoming podcast, Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real. — MH
We may live in a nominally secular, rational, and materialist age but reality seems to be straining under the weight of its accumulated contradictions. From rising religious fundamentalisms worldwide to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory to the now-naturalized surrealism of Trumpism, we’re clearly experiencing something of a collective crack-up.
