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Articles by Benjamin Breen
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way Another day, another historical cipher broken by a frontier model. Yesterday, the security researcher Carter Church announced that he had used GPT-6 Astra (working on the problem for six hours) to break a Napoleonic-era cipher that had previously resisted all decryption attempts.
AI labs need to start funding historical research
I’ve written previously about the pitfalls and use cases for AI in augmenting historical research, but things have changed significantly since 2024-25. Occasioned by the dueling releases of GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5 this week, I thought I’d share some early results with using these models not just to perform “research assistant” type functions like transcribing documents, but to try to actually solve existing historical problems.
The "mechanical miracle" that ruined Mark Twain's life
“All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.” Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a typesetting device which was among the most complex machines ever built up to that point in history. It was also a ruinous disaster for everyone involved — despite being a good idea.
The “Mechanical Miracle” That Ruined Mark Twain’s Life
The “Mechanical Miracle” That Ruined Mark Twain’s Life Published August 7, 2026 “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.” Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a typesetting device which was among the most complex machines ever built up to that point in history. It was also a ruinous disaster for everyone involved — despite being a good idea.
Why etymologies matter
“Little bit you speak Farsi?” my two-year-old daughter Yara asked me yesterday. My wife and I are raising Yara and her little sister in a bilingual household with both Farsi (Persian) and English. Although I’m the English-speaker 99 percent of the time, I have indeed been making an effort to learn Farsi. As a historian, I find it an especially fun language because there are so many hints of past events embedded in the vocabulary itself.
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
My first year of college, I had a work-study job which ended up being one of the most sneakily important intellectual experiences of my life. I was a lowly library shelver, assigned to the shelves labelled A through F section in the Library of Congress filing system: mostly works on religion, philosophy, sociology, and history. I say sneakily important because at first glance, shelving books in a library is super boring.
What is happening to publishing?
Literature's new AI scandal and why good non-fiction books will always matter The big news in the world of writing today is the controversy over the award of a Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize to a story called “The Serpent in the Grove.” The piece was almost certainly co-authored by AI. As of this morning, the magazine that published the piece (the prestigious literary journal Granta) has not issued a retraction.
The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations
I spent last week at Harvard doing research in the archives of William James, the psychologist, philosopher, psychical researcher, brother of Henry James, and all around interesting person. He was a brilliant, charming, self-defeating, deeply strange man (exhibit A: he believed taking a high dose of nitrous oxide helped him finally understand Hegel). That mixture of qualities comes across vividly in his papers. What doesn’t, at least at first, is that he was a talented visual artist.
The Secret History of Knocking on Wood
Most of human nature is never written down — and machines can't learn it from text My younger daughter, Nava, turned two last week. Among her favorite phrases are “No, Nava do it” and “what da HECK.” Her favorite music, by a wide margin, is Elton John. And her favorite gesture is a hearty, full-body nod. She deploys this repertoire with enormous humor, precision, and grace. I love being a parent.
What is happening to writing?
Last week, an essay laying out a case for how AI will change knowledge work went enormously viral on X, where it currently sits at 84 million views: I agree with much of it, though parts were overstated and other parts were clearly submarine marketing. But what was most striking to me wasn’t the content, but the obvious fact that large swathes of it were written by AI. I suspect that the “AI slop” quality was actually part of why it did so well.
Why I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
I was 25 years old when I started writing the blog version of Res Obscura, which ran from 2010 to 2023 (and still exists here). This was the early summer of 2010. I was a second-year PhD student in history, living with two roommates in a 1920s bungalow on the east side of Austin. And I was very dedicated to the idea that you should aim to write a new blog post every day: The first few posts of Res Obscura, all written in an apparently rather frantic week in June of 2010.
Bridging the Talent Gap to Build Project Success
- October 28, 2025 Request to reuse this Add to my favorites Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Construction, Lessons Learned Log in or sign up to view this on-demand webinar OR Log in or sign up to view this on-demand webinar OR Log in or sign up to view this on-demand webinar OR 58m 23s Duration Overview This webinar explores the organizational and people-related challenges threatening project success and offers actionable strategies rooted in global research, case studies, and lessons from...
All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning
Oxford University is immersed in the past like no other place I’ve seen. One example: when I was a visiting student at Oxford in 2005, I remember meeting two students at a pub one evening. They were drinking ivy-laced beer. The reason, I was told, is that centuries ago, a student from Lincoln College had murdered a student of Brasenose. Ever since then, Brasenose students had been allowed into Lincoln and given free beer once a year.
OpenAI's new "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery
“Study Mode,” a new educational feature released yesterday by OpenAI to much fanfare, was inevitable. The roadblocks were few. Leaders of educational institutions seem lately to be in a sort of race to see who can be first to forge partnerships with AI labs. And on a technical level, careful prompting of LLMs could already get them to engage in Socratic questioning and dynamic quizzing. In fact, Study Mode appears to be just that: it is a system prompt grafted on to the existing ChatGPT models.
AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder
Writing recently in The New Yorker, the historian of science D.
Onfim's world
The sketches survived by chance, preserved on strips of birch bark found during Soviet archaeological excavations. They had been intended for use by school children from the medieval state of Novgorod. These children, who lived around the year 1250 CE, were meant to be learning how to read and write. But one student named Onfim used them to draw. And for this reason, Onfim has become immortal.
When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar. These moments seem to ripple outward, lapping up against the present in unexpected ways. Lately, I have been deeply dispirited by the current attack on academia here in the US — the deportation of graduate students and researchers, the dismantling of a huge range of important projects via funding cuts to NIH and elsewhere.
The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope
Lately I’ve been reading a wonderful book called The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s by the historian H.W. Brands. One takeaway: the peoplenoting the similarities between the 2020s and the 1890s are right. From protectionism to polarization to fears of mass automation, the parallels are sometimes uncanny.
When the Sackler Brothers studied LSD
My book Tripping on Utopiaturned one year old earlier this month, and I am finding myself thinking less and less about the history of psychedelic science — my main historical preoccupation for upwards of five years now. I tend to be on the obsessive side, as writers and researchers go. The reason for this is that I greatly enjoy the experience of digging into archives and finding things that, if not new, exactly, had more or less been forgotten since they were created.
The leading AI models are now good historians
This is a post I began writing last year, but several things got in the way: above all, paternity leave. But also my own increasing dismay at the ways that LLMs were being used by students in the classroom. Ask anyone you know in education: ChatGPT has been a disaster when it comes to facilitating student cheating and — perhaps even more troubling — contributing to a general malaise among undergraduates. It’s not just that students are submitting entirely AI-written assignments.
Abstract This paper introduces the HistoryLens framework, which leverages LLMs to create interactive, primary source-based textual “simulations” that involve students in the process of analyzing, comparing, and critiquing historical narratives.
2,000-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
In 2019, construction workers in Carmona, Spain uncovered something remarkable underneath a very old house: an access shaft that led them to a Roman tomb which had remained perfectly sealed for two thousand years. The tomb itself was striking enough: a vaulted chamber decorated with geometric patterns in red and ochre, its walls lined with eight niches for funeral urns. But it was what they found in one of those niches that would prove extraordinary.
Why did clothing become boring?
One of the reasons I’m a historian is that I find the strangeness of the past to be underrated. You can find something deeply, fascinatingly weird about virtually any aspect of any human culture prior to around the year 1880, provided you take the time to dig into it. Here’s an example for you: I stumbled on this image last week while reading the Wikipedia page for Terra Mariana, a medieval state which covered part of present day Latvia and Estonia.
A very deep history of Halloween
You know the holiday: the one where people wear outlandish costumes and sweet things are eaten. It’s fun, but also otherworldly, with roots in an ancient belief that this evening — this one night at the change of the seasons — is when spirits roam the earth. I’m referring, of course, to qāšoq-zani, celebrated in Iran on the eve of Chaharshanbe Suri, the beginning of the Persian New Year festivities. And also Halloween. And Día de Muertos. The days of the calendar differ.
Post-postal
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world that my two daughters — both under the age of three— will inhabit when they’re adults. Last night, I was surprised to find that my older daughter Yara was able to recognize a 1980s-style tape deck in a picture book we were reading (“this… a… musicbox,” she said, after studying it intently). And she certainly knows what the mail is — in fact, one of her favorite books is called The Jolly Postman.
On 17th century "cocaine"
Earlier this year, amid a sea of bones in the vaulted crypt beneath Milan’s Ca’ Granda hospital, Italian researchers made an intriguing discovery. Analyzing mummified brain tissue from two men who died at the hospital in the seventeenth century, they found evidence of coca use—the earliest ever detected outside of South America. Their results, published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science, push back our documentation of coca’s presence in the Old World by nearly two centuries.
Tripping on Utopia By Benjamin Breen
ARTGALLERY.YALE.EDU Conversation, David W. Blight Discusses His Biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom with Ta-Nehisi Coates Together with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the Department of History, the Yale University Art Gallery celebrates the release of David W. Blight’s new biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Join us for a st...
Tripping on Utopia By Benjamin Breen
ARTGALLERY.YALE.EDU Conversation, David W. Blight Discusses His Biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom with Ta-Nehisi Coates Together with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the Department of History, the Yale University Art Gallery celebrates the release of David W. Blight’s new biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Join us for a st...
Centuries of Childhood
One of my favorite documentaries is the 2010 French film Babies. Told without narration, it follows four babies in four cultures: Mongolia, Namibia, California, and Japan. Here’s the trailer: I first watched it in 2021 with my wife Roya, when she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. Those months leading up to the birth of our daughter Yara almost felt like we were studying for an exam.
The Libertarian Crack-Up and Conflicting American Ideas of Liberty
News that Donald Trump will address the Libertarian Party convention has some people saying, Huh? (Official LP press release here.) In a column titled “Are Libertarians MAGA-Adjacent Now?” centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes: how much common ground can there exist between libertarian opponents of government power at home and abroad and a former president who oozes authoritarianism from his pores?
How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture
Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version In the summer of 1930, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second husband and fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune, made their way to the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. At age 28, Mead had already gained renown for her ethnographic study Coming of Age in Samoa. In Samoa, she had found a society whose looser sexual mores she came to view as a challenge to rigid Western norms.
"He spoke of computers with some awe"
I recently had the chance to discuss my book Tripping on Utopiawith the physicist Sean Carroll on his Mindscape podcast. Typically, Sean’s guests are scientists, but he’s also spoken to a range of interesting people in the humanities (one favorite: Adrienne Mayor on “Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology.”) In the episode, which you can listen to here, I mentioned a detail I encountered in my research that stuck with me.
Allen Ginsberg Muses on His Role in the Birth of LSD Research
Below you’ll find an excerpt of my book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science about the origins of psychedelic science in 1930s through 1960s. By drawing on understudied archives and original interviews, it restores key players in the field’s origin — many of them women — to their rightful place alongside more familiar names like Timothy Leary.
Chatter: Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and the CIA with Benjamin Breen
Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard stories about the CIA’s experiments with drugs, particularly LSD, during the infamous MKUltra program. But you may not know that the characters involved in that dubious effort connect to one of the 20th Century’s most famous and revered scientists, the anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Improving project delivery on large scale projects with AI
As projects become more intricate and global, the demand for skilled project professionals who can seamlessly integrate the latest trends, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), with robust project management capabilities is on the rise. AI is not merely a trend, but a transformative force that is redefining project management, writes Benjamin Breen, Global Director Construction and Regional Managing Director, MENA (Interim), Project Management Institute.
Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab
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Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab
In the 1930s, the married anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had seen themselves as scientists seeking to expand the accepted limits of “normal” human behavior, communication, and consciousness. By the 1940s they came to believe that their project could help ensure the survival of humanity itself, threatened as it was by the spread of fascism and the advent of atomic warfare. They regarded both as a product of “pathogenic” cultural patterns — ideas that drive you insane.
Cary Grant made LSD therapy fashionable
When I began researching Tripping on Utopia in 2018, I was aware that many midcentury scientists and psychiatrists had shown a keen interest in the promise of psychedelics. But what I didn’t realize was how remarkably broad-based this interest was. As I dug deeper into the archival record, I was struck by the public enthusiasm for the use of substances like LSD and mescaline in therapy—as manifested not just in scientific studies, but in newspaper articles and even television specials.
What if one of our most respected 20th-century scientists had advocated publicly for psychedelics?
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A new book documents Margaret Mead’s consideration of psychedelics. Original
Skip to the content History Margaret Mead was among the most famous scientists of the 20th century. Despite this, however, her role in the early history of psychedelic research has gone strangely unnoticed.
The (history of) spice must flow
To me, one of the most intriguing objects housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York is a container for something that few people have ever heard of: the lapis de Goa, or “Goa stone.” Goa stones were a compound of gold, crushed gemstones, herbs, bezoars, and other exotic substances popular in the 1690-1750 period. Like the bezoars they imitated, they were thought to offer a powerful protection against poisoning.
My 3 Greatest Revelations
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Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science”
1 Public acceptance of psychedelics was surprisingly widespread during the 1950s Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . When I began researching Tripping on Utopia in 2018, I was aware that many midcentury scientists and psychiatrists had shown a keen interest in the promise of psychedelics. But what I didn’t realize was how remarkably broad-based this interest was.
Tripping on Utopia By Benjamin Breen
Subscribe Share Past Issues RSS Translate View this email in your browser The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. —Senator Edward Kennedy, 1980 Dear Friends and Supporters of the Houston Institute: As most of you know, Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. courageously announced this summer that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
Why drug history?
Somewhat by accident, I’ve now written two books about the history of drugs. This was not by design. When I entered grad school in 2008, I had two goals: to work with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, whose articles I had admired when I was an undergrad, and to come up with a dissertation topic involving the Elizabethan magus John Dee. I succeeded at the former, but not the latter.
Tripping on Utopia
Subscribe to our Daily Deal emails and never miss a great deal. Daily Deals are available only to Audible customers in the US and Canada. Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science Narrated by: Suzanne Toren Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins 4.6 out of 5 stars 4.6 (26 ratings) Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Exploring Victorian occultism and the art of synesthesia
HomeCultureArt & Theatre Exploring Victorian occultism and the art of synesthesia Benjamin Breen investigates Victorian mysticism, the idea of visual auras and their influence on the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades This article was originally published in 2019 in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/legal/ “I have always considered myself a voice of what I...
Cary Grant, congresswoman were tripping on acid years before Timothy Leary’s hippies Original
Turns out, it’s a longer, stranger trip. While LSD is often associated with 1960s hippies and Timothy Leary, that’s not the whole story. “The first era of global experimentation with consciousness-expanding substances took place much earlier than commonly thought, in the 1920s through the 1950s, rather than the 1960s and 1970s,” Benjamin Breen writes in his new book, “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” (out Tuesday).
Margaret Mead wanted to save the world through LSD. The government had other ideas
On the Shelf Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science By Benjamin Breen Grand Central: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Benjamin Breen, a young historian at UC Santa Cruz, has written a gripping new book that tells a remarkable story.
Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators
The mid-January publication day for my book Tripping on Utopiais fast approaching, and I will have some exciting news to share about book publicity and advance reviews soon. But for now, I am going to return to a topic that has been on my mind over the past year — using generative AI as a kind of history simulator — and try it it out directly on my book’s content.
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