Around fifteen thousand years ago, the hunter-gatherer communities that populated the southern Levant experienced a radical transformation in their social and spatial organization. Those groups that until then had maintained a nomadic lifestyle, moving with the herds and the seasons, drastically reduced their mobility and established the first permanent settlements known in the region. This […]
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Les réactions de certaines personnes noires qui critiquent ceux qui dénoncent les systèmes de domination hérités de l’histoire donnent le sentiment que la mémoire de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de la colonisation demeure encore largement méconnue. Cette situation empêche de débattre convenablement des séquelles laissées par les tragédies vécues par les Noirs. Lorsque […]
Avec le remix de « Nakou Aza », le reggaeman Zoanet Comes insuffle une nouvelle énergie à l’un de ses titres engagés. À travers cette nouvelle version, l’artiste installé en France depuis plusieurs années poursuit son combat contre le racisme anti-Noirs et pour la dignité des personnes victimes de discriminations liées à leur couleur de […]
Indiana Jones is the quintessential adventurer, and you can trace much of that reputation back to Raiders of the Lost Ark. This debut film begins with the archaeologist exploring a South American jungle. He enters a rundown temple to find a golden idol, but removing the artifact triggers the temple’s collapse. The most imposing obstacle […]
What do Greeks mean when they speak of food dishes as “orphans” or “married”? As the month of August is practically and eagerly seeking for light news this is a good opportunity to enlighten my non-Greek audience about critical descriptions in the popular terminology of the Greek Food Culture. Both “orphans” and “married” refer to […]
Dans la plupart des pays d’Afrique subsaharienne, la culture occupe une place marginale dans les politiques publiques. Les ministères qui en ont la charge disposent souvent des plus faibles budgets. Ce mépris déborde le cadre des institutions. Il se manifeste également dans plusieurs secteurs de la société. Dans de nombreuses rédactions, par exemple, être affecté […]
Présenté par la Bible comme un juif né en Judée, Jésus occupe une place centrale dans l’histoire du christianisme. Pour les chrétiens, il est Dieu, le Fils de Dieu, le Christ et le sauveur de l’humanité. À l’inverse, la majorité des juifs reconnaissent Yahvé comme Dieu unique, doutent de l’existence historique de Jésus, de sa […]
Vingt-cinq historiens enquêtent sur le rôle des religions dans les processus de colonisation entre le XVIe et le XXe siècle. En couvrant une chronologie et une géographie très étendues, cet ouvrage collectif rompt avec les approches simplificatrices. Religions et colonisation est un ouvrage de synthèse historique sur la place et le rôle des religions dans […]
La polémique est bien réelle. Quelques mois après sa nomination, Glady Djiraye Clotilde Coly, nouvelle ministre des Sports du Sénégal, est devenue la cible de nombreuses critiques sur sa coiffure. Ses cheveux très courts, qualifiés par certains de coupe « garçonne », ont été jugés incompatibles avec l’image qu’ils se font d’une femme ministre. Cette […]
Les propos tenus par la sénatrice paraguayenne Celeste Amarilla à l’encontre de Kylian Mbappé sont d’une gravité qui dépasse largement le seul cas du joueur français. Ces déclarations, à caractère suprémaciste et déshumanisant, portent atteinte à la dignité de millions de personnes noires à travers le monde qui subissent encore les conséquences de préjugés racistes. […]
For China Books Review, Zhang Er reflects on growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and how she owes her love of reading to Auntie Zou, a librarian who stripped banned books of their covers and any pages marked with the library seal of the Workers’ Club, smuggled them home, and secretly loaned them to her. Even amid the chaos of that era, Er remembers this part of her childhood as magical, a time “where characters sprung from their pages and interwove with each other’s lives,” and she imagined worlds far beyond the one she lived in.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I could read fast enough to finish the weekly book loan in two days, so I had time to spare before returning it to Auntie Zou. By then I had made a good friend, Yu Ping, who loved reading too. Her home was three blocks from mine. I would bicycle to her place and deliver the book to her. Yu Ping would read day and night to finish the book and return it to me before the due date. We would keep the book wrapped in old newspapers, so that we could read in class without getting into trouble, while our teachers repeated the same quotations from Mao, week after week.
In 1935, two chemists at Tokyo’s Imperial University synthesized a new molecule and unwittingly launched one of the strangest narratives of the psychedelic age. Toshio Hoshino and Kenya Shimodaira were working on a family of compounds known as the tryptamines, which occur widely in nature and have a range of intriguing biological properties. The neurotransmitter serotonin, which among other things regulates mood, cognition, and social behavior, is a tryptamine. So are many psychoactive drugs, although this would only be discovered later on. The Japanese scientists had recently completed the world’s first laboratory synthesis of a molecule called bufotenine, which is produced by toads and certain species of mushrooms. Now, via a sequence of reactions, they engineered a close chemical relative. Diagrams of the two tryptamines looked nearly identical, each represented by two angular rings and a tail, resembling microscopic organisms; the only difference lay in the shape of the head. Such tiny changes in chemical structure “can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points,” as the writer and organic chemist Primo Levi once wrote. The new molecule’s name, following scientific convention, would be 5-MeO-DMT.
Hoshino and Shimodaira published their findings in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan, leaving no explanation as to why they had conducted these experiments. The early 20th century was a time of wide-ranging exploration in organic chemistry, with researchers synthesizing new compounds to assess their pharmacological potential or better understand the reactions by which one substance could be transformed into another. Many of these compounds had no evident utility, such as 5-MeO-DMT, which for decades was thought only to be a product of the laboratory.
This changed in 1959, when the molecule was isolated from a shrub native to Brazil. Not long afterward, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in Anadenanthera peregrina, a leguminous tree from the Caribbean and South America. For thousands of years, Indigenous communities had been harvesting its slender bean pods to prepare snuffs called cohoba or yopo, which were typically inhaled using hollow bones or bamboo shoots—the earliest known use of psychedelics in the New World. “With this powder they lose consciousness and become like drunken men,” Christopher Columbus observed in the 15th century. The Spaniards regarded such practices as demonic and sought to eradicate them as they colonized the region. After witnessing a yopo ceremony in the Andes, where the snuff was dispensed from a snail shell with a spoon carved from the bone of a puma, one missionary reported, “They summoned the devil.”
The rich biodiversity of the Amazon also yielded other hallucinogenic snuffs containing 5-MeO-DMT. These were prepared from trees in the nutmeg family and were known, in some local communities, as “semen of the sun.” In the early 1950s, a distinguished Harvard scholar named Richard Evans Schultes had documented the snuffs being used for “witchcraft, divination and the diagnosis of illness” by the medicine men of more than half a dozen tribes, describing the effects as “virulently potent.” Schultes expressed incredulity that such a widely used substance had gone unstudied for so long. “It makes one wonder how many more narcotic plants, up to now obscured by better-known ones, still wait to be discovered,” he wrote. These snuffs were only later found to contain 5-MeO-DMT.
A tall, bespectacled man who wore a pith helmet in the jungle, Schultes was considered the father of modern ethnobotany, a field that studies the traditional uses of plants. He was also one of the world’s foremost experts on psychedelic rituals in an era before they had captured mainstream attention. In the 1930s, he had uncovered the ceremonial use of psilocybin mushrooms in southern Mexico and identified the source of an ancient Aztec sacrament as the seeds of a native morning glory vine, which contained a chemical cousin of LSD. He went on to live in the Amazon for a decade, documenting thousands of medicinal plant traditions while researching alternative rubber sources for the US military. The only provisions he carried were instant coffee and tins of Boston baked beans.
Even then, Schultes recognized that incursions from the wider world threatened the survival of Indigenous knowledge. “Time is running out,” he once warned. “The Indians’ botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.” Yet capturing this knowledge, as an outsider, was a formidable endeavor. In addition to navigating remote and inhospitable regions, ethnobotanists had to draw on scattered records from disparate disciplines—botany, anthropology, archaeology, plant chemistry, pharmacology, history, geography and sundry other tangential fields of the sciences and arts,” as Schultes put it. There was always the risk that in selecting and piecing together this information one might draw false conclusions.
A misleading narrative about psychedelic toads took hold, involving not only the wrong molecule but the wrong species entirely.
In the 1960s, while Schultes was continuing his ethnobotanical research, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in numerous other plants around the world, including a type of grass that could cause grazing sheep to convulse uncontrollably, a phenomenon known as “staggers.” Then, in 1964, the molecule showed up in an animal for the first time, detected in the skins of Sonoran Desert toads, a species that had formerly been of interest only to the occasional herpetologist. This breakthrough was thanks to an Italian chemist named Vittorio Erspamer. Earlier in his career, Erspamer had discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin—a pivotal moment in the field of neuroscience, laying the groundwork for understanding chemical signaling in the brain. His lifelong interest was pharmacognosy, or the study of drugs from natural sources; by the end of his career, he would identify and name more than 60 new compounds, including from octopuses, shellfish, and sea anemones, and twice be nominated for the Nobel Prize. “Land and sea are populated by a miraculous variety of creatures, representing the outcome of the tremendous biosynthetic work carried out by Nature over hundreds of millions of years,” he once wrote.
No animals captured his attention like amphibians, which he described as “an inexhaustible mine of active compounds.” In his laboratory, which was decorated with pictures of frogs and toads, Erspamer and his assistants minced the skins of different species with scissors and exposed them to a variety of tests: gas and paper chromatography, X-ray fluorescence analysis. Colleagues from around the world sent him samples by airmail, and in the early 1960s he received 21 Sonoran Desert toad specimens that had been skinned and dried in Arizona. (At the time, the species was classified as Bufa alvarius, a name that remains in widespread use despite being formally changed in 2006.) The findings were striking. All toads produce bufotenine, but this was the only species among some of the most chemically diverse animals in the world that contained 5-MeO-DMT.
Erspamer’s study was published in a technical journal in 1965, just as the psychedelic revolution was getting started. At around this time, a small cohort of psychonauts began using synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, alerted by its discovery in South American snuffs, but it would be decades before anyone in this milieu realized that the same molecule could be obtained from a North American toad. Knowledge of psychedelic toads was fractured across niche academic disciplines, and even Erspamer appears not to have been aware that 5-MeO-DMT had hallucinogenic properties. But over the next two decades, something remarkable happened: A misleading narrative about psychedelic toads took hold, involving not only the wrong molecule but the wrong species entirely. Although 5-MeO-DMT can produce experiences of overwhelming intensity, often interpreted as encounters with ultimate truth, the history of toad smoking is riddled with false leads and misinformation.
In 1956, a psychiatrist named Howard Fabing co-authored a study in Science, the prestigious academic journal, about the effects of a purported hallucinogen. Like many others in his field, he had become fascinated by drugs that appeared to evoke states of psychosis, inspired by the discovery, the previous decade, of LSD. People had reported overpowering hallucinations after consuming tiny doses of acid, as the substance would become known in psychedelic culture. “My field of vision fluctuated and swam like an image in a distorted mirror,” its creator, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann, recalled of his first trip (during which he somehow wobbled home from work on his bicycle). Accounts like these, Fabing wrote, had “precipitated the whole field of biochemistry into a new look at the brain.” Psychoanalysis had long been the dominant paradigm for treating mental illness, but now another possibility was arising. If certain compounds could seemingly induce the symptoms of insanity, then perhaps insanity was a result of faulty brain chemistry—and could thus be treated with psychiatric drugs.
Fabing’s interest lay in using psychedelics not as therapeutic agents but as tools for understanding how a healthy mind could malfunction. This was seen as especially urgent in the 1950s, when around half the hospital beds in the developed world were occupied by patients with schizophrenia and other mental disorders. “The stakes are high,” Fabing wrote. Scientists had begun revisiting anthropological accounts of hallucinogenic rituals—iboga ceremonies in Central Africa, peyote cults in the American Southwest. The term “psychedelics” was not yet in use; instead, such substances were known as psychotomimetics, reflecting an underlying belief that they induced not illumination but madness. Intriguingly, many of them shared a chemical structure with serotonin.
This line of inquiry had led Fabing to bufotenine, the tryptamine relative of 5-MeO-DMT that Hoshino and Shimodaira had originally synthesized. Besides occurring in most toad species, bufotenine was known to occur in fly agaric mushrooms, the iconic red toadstools of fairy tales, and thought to be the origin of the Norse berserker legend, involving warriors who reputedly consumed the mushrooms and entered such frenzied states that they were invincible in battle—the root of the phrase “going berserk.” Separate accounts from Siberia described nomadic herders using fly agaric in shamanic ceremonies, taking pains to prolong its psychoactive effects. “The urine of persons intoxicated with fly agaric is not wasted,” an anthropologist noted in 1901. “The drunkard himself drinks it to prolong his hallucinations, or he offers it to others as a treat.”
Fabing hypothesized that schizophrenia might arise from the abnormal production of bufotenine in the brain, possibly instead of serotonin. To explore the compound’s effects in more controlled settings, he and a colleague injected subjects with escalating doses and monitored their reactions. One man experienced a bodily numbness that he described as “a pleasant Martini feeling.” Another became light-headed and reported visual hallucinations. “I see white straight lines with a black background. I can’t trace a pattern,” he exclaimed. “Nowthere are red, green, and yellow dots, very bright, like they were made out of fluorescent cloth, moving like blood cells through capillaries, weaving in and out of the white lines.” Based on the results of this experiment, the scientists concluded that bufotenine had hallucinogenic properties similar to LSD.
This finding, published in a reputed journal, would later cross disciplinary lines and be picked up in the rush to solve a major anthropological mystery. Across Mesoamerica, archaeologists had unearthed a preponderance of toad artifacts, including detailed depictions of the parotid glands (located at the top of the neck) in which toads produce their defense toxins. Each of the great civilizations—the Olmecs, the Mayans, the Aztecs—had left behind extensive toad artworks: sculptures, altars, friezes, ceramics. There were middens of toad bones in what appeared to be ritual contexts, sometimes comprising thousands of skeletons. What significance had these ancient societies ascribed to toads?
Women in ancient Rome used toad secretions to murder their husbands; 16th-century Italian chemists laced salts with toad toxins for poisoning the food of enemies.
In the 1970s, amid surging popular interest in psychedelics, a compelling academic theory arose: that toads had been used as ritual intoxicants, much like psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca. It was well established that Indigenous cultures across the region had performed healing or shamanic rituals with psychedelics. Of the psychoactive plants identified worldwide, close to 90 percent were native to the Americas, with more than a dozen psychedelic traditions documented in Mexico alone. Fabing’s research had suggested that bufotenine, which occurs inmany species of toads, was hallucinogenic. The pieces of the puzzle all seemed to connect.
There was also an obvious candidate species: Bufa marinus, more commonly known as the cane toad, a lumbering, fleshy creature that can grow up to ten inches in length and weigh as much as six pounds, a little less than a typical newborn baby. Cane toads were native to Central America, dwelling in marshlands and swamps. They corresponded to many of the archaeological depictions of toads, with bulging parotid glands, and their bones were frequently excavated during archaeological digs. It wasn’t long before researchers were confidently asserting that there had been a psychedelic cane toad tradition in Mesoamerica. “The Olmecs had a predisposition for consuming toads,” one scholar wrote in a book about the region’s archaeology. “Consumption of these toads produces hallucinations.”
* The dark art of toad poisoning seemingly made a return in May 2022, when a Russian oligarch whose firm had called for an end to the invasion of Ukraine died after visiting a shaman who served him a “hangover cure” prepared using toads. Three other senior executives at the company have since died in mysterious circumstances, presumptively at the behest of the Russian government, including a former chairman who fell out of a hospital window.
Yet the theory had a glaring weakness. In addition to bufotenine, the cane toad produces an array of other chemicals, several of them acutely toxic. Its glands secrete two classes of compounds, bufogenin and bufotoxin, that can be lethal to humans even in tiny doses. Similar molecules are found in the skins of many toad species around the world and have long been used for preparing poisons. Women in ancient Rome used toad secretions to murder their husbands; 16th-century Italian chemists laced salts with toad toxins for poisoning the food of enemies. At English country fairs in the 17th and 18th centuries, charlatan doctors hawked medicines by feeding live toads to hired assistants, who fainted or became delirious in front of onlookers, only to revive upon swallowing whichever concoction was being advertised. The assistants survived by lining their mouths and stomachs with oil or by consuming large meals in advance. They became known as “toadies,” a word that has drifted from being associated with charlatanism to its modern definition: a sycophant or obsequious helper.*
The driving question for proponents of the psychedelic cane toad hypothesis thus became how precolonial Mesoamerican cultures might have isolated bufotenine from these deadlier defense toxins. In the early 1970s, an American graduate student named Timothy Knab went searching the Mexican countryside for a healer, or curandero, who could provide an answer. Knab eventually came across an elderly man in the mountains of Veracruz who claimed to remember a potion that had not been used in decades. The man ground the glands of 10 cane toads into a paste, added lime water and ash, then boiled the mixture overnight. This was stirred into corn beer, filtered, mixed with cornmeal, and left for several days to ferment before being heated to drive off the remaining moisture. The result was a hardened doughlike substance. The curandero refused to consume it and only reluctantly consented to dose Knab, who recorded the experience in dissociative terms. “Profuse sweating is noted along with a sudden increase in heartbeat,” he wrote. “The heartbeat becomes continuously harder and stronger. A pronounced chill sets in with twitching of the facial and eye muscles. A pounding headache and delirium shortly follow the onset of twitching.” For several hours, he lay in front of a fire, sweating and unable to move.
In a seeming blow to the theory, Knab reported no hallucinations from this experiment. But his account, which he presented at an anthropology conference in Mexico City, stirred the imagination of another young scholar. Alison Kennedy was the heiress of a wealthy Palo Alto family who would later adopt the alter ego Queen Mu and launch an influential cyberculture magazine called Mondo 2000, a futuristic mash-up of technology, psychedelics, and arts writing. Before all of this, Kennedy was an anthropology graduate student with an interest in Mesoamerican iconography; this had led her, almost inevitably, to the question of toads. She turned her eye to the artifacts of the Olmecs, who died out around twenty-five hundred years ago and are considered the first major civilization in Mesoamerica. Jaguars featured prominently among their artworks, which many researchers had interpreted as a sign of mythological significance. But Kennedy concluded that this had been a case of mistaken identity. Many of the artworks weren’t jaguars, she argued. They were toads.
In support, she presented dozens of illustrations, focusing on what she described as “the attributes of toadiness”: downturned mouths, inward-facing forelimbs, glandular swellings. She became drawn, like so many others in her field, to the idea that toads had been used in psychedelic ceremonies.
To account for the toxicity of the toads, Kennedy proposed a solution that reads like science fiction from the magazine she later founded. In addition to toads, the Olmecs had left behind depictions of many other animals, including ducks, which have highly efficient livers. Perhaps ducks had been used as bio-processors, feeding on toads and metabolizing their poisonous compounds so that humans could safely consume them. Kennedy drew attention to Olmec figurines of people wearing what appeared to be duck-billed masks. These masks would have provided protection from “venom spatters” as putative toad shamans “stood at their toad altars lancing the parotid glands,” she posited. This relied on the assumption that ducks could eat toads without being poisoned themselves. To investigate further, Kennedy visited a zoo in Texas, where she and the head aviculturist flung some cane toads into a duck pond. The ducks had been reared in captivity and were “toad-naive,” as Kennedy wrote, yet they pursued the toads with avidity, juggling their soft bodies before gulping them down. Kennedy described this behavior as “singular and apparently wholly instinctive.” Duck bills have neither nerve endings for sensing toad toxins nor blood vessels for absorbing them; the juggling movements were conceivably an adaptation for rinsing poisons into the water. Two of the duck species in the pond happened to be native to Mexico, home of both the Olmec culture and Bufa marinus. Here, at least, was proof that ducks had an appetite for the toads.
Now Kennedy took her suppositions even further, reexamining the literature on a famous Olmec site where thousands of toad skeletons had been excavated. The ruins featured an elaborate system of water channels hewn from some three hundred tons of rock, running between a sculpture of a jaguar (or possibly a toad) and an enormous stone receptacle in the shape of a duck. The main channel drained into a series of smaller pools too shallow for human bathing; confounded researchers had guessed that they were for unspecified “ritual use.” With a flourish, Kennedy now presented her final claim: That this complex hydraulic system had been designed as an integrated bufo-culture station, including both spawning grounds for toads and a captive population of bio-processing ducks. These bold ideas won her a prize at an anthropology conference in 1979, but there was one problem: No one had taken the obvious next step and tested whether the duck livers were in fact hallucinogenic. For all the scholarly attention it had garnered, the mystery of the psychedelic toad remained unresolved.
In the early 1980s, after reading about Fabing’s bufotenine study, a British artist named Adrian Morgan began a series of personal experiments with toads. These included “licking poison glands, rubbing animals against my forehead, and in one instance collecting venom with blotting paper . . . and then eating the paper,” he reported. Disappointingly, Morgan experienced no hallucinations from these tests, which seemed only to aggravate his research subjects. “One specimen of green toad showed its disgust by leaping from an open window into the celery patch below me,” he wrote. “It was never seen again.”
One spring, Morgan visited a forest outside London and came upon two dead female toads in a pond. He took them home, where he pounded their skins and poison glands in a mortar. Then he snuffed the residue and took notes in an increasingly jagged hand:
3:41 p.m. First quantity ingested into right nostril. Within one minute, nostril strongly anesthetized.
3:49 Sneezing violently, profuse sweating of forehead.
4:03 Fleeting pain at temples.
4:05 Salivating strongly.
4:15 Thick saliva at back of throat causing tendency to gag.
4:32 Feeling very tired.
Midway through, colors briefly appeared richer and moving objects left trails in his vision, like speed blurs. Morgan described these sensations as “only slightly psychedelic” and concluded, “The experience was not pleasant.”
Yet the notion of hallucinogenic toads persisted, cropping up in stranger contexts still. While Morgan was pursuing his investigations, stories of psychedelic cane toad use began surfacing in Australia, of all places, where the animals had been introduced in the 1930s to control pests on plantations. The toads had gone rogue, consuming native frogs, birds, insects, small marsupials, even Ping-Pong balls and cigarette butts flicked toward them at pubs—almost everything except the swarms of sugarcane beetles they had been imported to feed on. Australia’s plague of beetles had been compounded by a plague of toads.
This was possible in large part because toads are opportunistic and superbly adaptable creatures. They are residents of the gutter, the verge, the ditch. They can hunker down when times are bad and burst to life when conditions favor them. They are capable of producing millions of eggs. In their present form, toads have existed for at least 30 million years, enduring all kinds of planetary upheaval, from ice ages to the rise of humans. Released onto a new continent, the cane toads marauded unstoppably.
For all the scholarly attention it had garnered, the mystery of the psychedelic toad remained unresolved.
In the 1980s, 50 years into the invasion, an Australian filmmaker named Mark Lewis began working on a satirical documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which Werner Herzog later declared to be his favorite film of all time. Hundreds of millions of the animals had taken up residence across Australia’s east coast, expanding their occupied range at a rate of more than 15 miles annually. Researchers dubbed the toads “an amphibian weed.” Streets were slicked with flattened toad carcasses, which emitted a fishy aroma. Bands of vigilantes went after the animals with cricket bats or swerved deliberately to run them over, but the toads continued their relentless spread.
During his research for the film, Lewis picked up on a rumor that people were getting high on the toads. He ended up speaking by phone with a man who claimed to have been in prison, where the inmates “would race to grab a toad if it found its way inside the compound,” Lewis told me. His source was unwilling to appear on camera, so Lewis hired an actor to deliver the lines. “You use a little quantity at first, then larger,” the man mumbles in the film, which identifies him as a “cane toad drug abuser” from the town of Mullumbimby. He makes a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s writings, saying how users of peyote would “see the world through the consciousness of the cactus. “With a weak laugh, the man adds, “The toad’s the same.”
The documentary also features a detective from Queensland who attests that people in “hippie communes” have been tripping on cane toads since at least the 1970s. “When heroin and other drugs weren’t freely available, the next best alternative was to go out and get a cane toad, “the detective explains. These toads would be boiled down in billycans to produce a sludgy brew, which the hippies purportedly drank. “From what I’ve been told, they had fantastic color hallucinations, “the detective says. “It warped their sense of time.”
Australians have a certain reputation for toughness, but even the hardiest among them would likely have been poisoned by the bufotoxins in this recipe. Yet Lewis also heard about a more plausible mode of ingestion. A local narcotics squad was said to possess a jar of confiscated dried cane toad skins that could be “shredded and put into a hookah or a pipe and smoked,” apparently causing intense hallucinatory effects. At one point during his research (“to see what all the fuss was about”) Lewis rolled a small quantity with tobacco into a joint. “I smoked it, and the only result was that I got a bad headache,” he told me. “I would not recommend that kids try this at home.”
Dubiously sourced accounts followed of Australians who died after drinking toad tea and a man supposedly being imprisoned in South America on toad-licking charges.
But in 1988, the year Lewis’s film came out, a moral panic began that swept the concept of psychedelic toads into popular culture. “I feel partly responsible,” Lewis told me decades later, sounding mystified. This strange sequence began with media reports in the United States of Australian hippies “forsaking traditional drugs for cane toads, which they boil for a slimy, potentially lethal cocktail.” Later that year, a doctor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, a San Francisco drug treatment facility established during the Summer of Love, jokingly mentioned the “rare 1960s practice of toad licking” during a lecture. Afterward, the clinic was inundated with calls from reporters around the world, wanting to know about “crazed hippies licking toads in the mountains,” as the clinic’s director later recalled. Staff assured the journalists that there was no evidence of toads being licked in the United States, but the idea, like some invasive animal, took on a life of its own. At a conference on crack cocaine the following year, the Berkeley police chief announced that toad licking was a “problem that comes up from time to time.” An official from the Drug Enforcement Administration was quoted saying that cane toad secretions were “in the same (legal) category as heroin or LSD.” Bufotenine had indeed been listed as a Schedule I substance in 1967—even though, at the time, there had been virtually no reports of anybody using it. Citing the DEA, news articles now declared toad licking “the latest way to hallucinate.” (One headline: ”A Desperation High: Crack? Coke? Croak!”) The DEA official later clarified that he had said nothing about toad licking, but the phrase continued spawning fresh rounds of coverage until, as Scientific American later put it, “reality imitated fiction.”
In 1989, two teenagers were hospitalized in New Mexico after licking toads, which they had read about in the papers. The following year, two men were admitted to an emergency ward in Canada, bewildered and vomiting, after reportedly scraping the back of a pet cane toad and eating its secretions on crackers; the tabloids later claimed that one of the men had committed suicide after being discharged. Dubiously sourced accounts followed of Australians who died after drinking toad tea and a man supposedly being imprisoned in South America on toad-licking charges. Hungry for copy, journalists pressed experts for comment. “It gives them a kick like alcohol,” an Australian herpetologist professed, of the toad users. In a foretelling of toad mythmaking to come, it had become difficult to tell fact, conjecture, and fabrication apart. “This is a case of media feeding on media,” a reporter who covered the story would later reflect. Psychedelic toads, as a 1993 journal article titled “Misuse and Legend in the ‘Toad Licking’ Phenomenon” described it, had become an “informational epidemic.”
Meanwhile, the television drama L.A. Law ran an episode involving a retiree accused of toad licking, and Beavis and Butt-Head licked toads on MTV. (“Tastes like chicken,” Beavis remarked.) Psychedelic toads also captured the attention of lawmakers: A state representative in Georgia cautioned his colleagues about “the extreme dangers of toad licking,” while a representative in South Carolina proposed sentencing offenders to community service at zoos. The men appear to have been speaking in jest, but Canadian police were serious when, in 1991, they urged officials to ban imports of cane toads and outlaw them as pets, citing “the deaths of several Australian drug users.” Before long, Australia also passed laws against psychoactive toad use, listing bufotenine as a controlled substance. Toad licking had become so ingrained in popular consciousness that three decades later, while I was working on this book, people continuously brought it up as a point of reference. Yet the hype about cane toads obscured a crucial detail. As the anthropologist Wade Davis, who became drawn into solving the mystery, would later write, “An animal venom that contained no hallucinogenic agent but that did contain lethal poisons was not likely to inspire a new drug craze.” A satirical film had broadcast rumors that snowballed into full-blown hysteria about cane toads, but there was still no evidence that they were psychoactive at all.
Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author ofThe Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.
In the middle of a parking lot in front of a supermarket in Schloßberg, in the district of Leibnitz in the Austrian state of Styria, stands a giant wooden structure that looks like a windmill. Known as a klopotec, this 19-meter tall structure with its imposing blades is a bird scarer, and is a cultural symbol of the wine growing regions of Slovenia and Styria.
On June 17, 2026, the European Parliament formally adopted regulations governing “New Genomic Techniques” (NGTs), marking a major turning point for European agriculture.
The decision paves the way for a new generation of genetically modified crops capable of withstanding drought and disease, but it has also raised legitimate concerns about the privatization of living organisms and potential environmental risks. The debate has divided the continent, pitting supporters of technological innovation against advocates of traditional farming.
What are NGTs and how do they differ from traditional GMOs?
NGTs, or New Genomic Techniques, represent a significant advance in plant genome editing. Unlike first-generation genetically modified organisms, which involve introducing foreign DNA from different species, NGTs operate on a fundamentally different principle.
These techniques allow scientists to modify a plant’s genome using only genes originating from the same species. For example, it may now be possible to make a tomato more resistant to aphids by transferring a gene from another naturally resistant tomato variety. Although these plants are technically genetically modified organisms, seeds produced through NGTs are not transgenic—a distinction that plays a key role in European regulations.
Two categories of NGTs and different regulatory standards
The compromise negotiated by the European Commission and member states established a two-tier classification system. Category 1 NGTs, involving a limited number of naturally occurring mutations, will be treated as equivalent to conventional varieties and will benefit from partial deregulation.
By contrast, NGTs engineered for herbicide resistance or designed to produce insecticides will not be authorized for commercial use, in the interest of sustainability and environmental protection.
Another major restriction is that no NGT crops will be allowed in organic farming, creating a clear divide between agricultural production using these technologies and certified organic agriculture.
European agriculture confronts climate challenges
Supporters of NGTs—including major farming organizations such as Copa-Cogeca and leading European seed companies—argue that these technologies are essential for maintaining competitiveness and adapting to climate change. NGTs could significantly accelerate the development of crop varieties capable of tolerating severe drought and extreme heat, both of which are becoming increasingly common across Europe.
For some farmers, particularly in the French Caribbean territories, NGTs offer a practical solution to existing plant diseases. Banana plantations, for example, have been devastated by black Sigatoka, a destructive fungal disease against which NGTs could provide natural resistance. Such practical applications have helped mobilize support within the agricultural sector for the new regulations.
Advocates also emphasize that the European Union is creating a “sovereign European model” distinct from those of the United States and Brazil, with specific safeguards governing approved techniques and strict oversight of the sector.
Environmental concerns and the privatization of life
Critics of NGTs raise fundamental concerns about agricultural sustainability and intellectual property rights. According to opponents, the safety of NGTs for human health and the environment has not been sufficiently established through democratic processes. They are calling for mandatory traceability and a ban on patenting living organisms.
Farmers’ unions such as the Confédération Paysanne view NGTs as a “Trojan horse” for major seed and agrochemical corporations. Their primary concern is the gradual monopolization of seeds by a handful of agribusiness giants, forcing smaller seed companies and farmers to pay licensing fees. Critics argue that such a trend could accelerate crop uniformity and reduce agricultural biodiversity.
They also warn that increasing corporate control over genetic resources could marginalize small farmers and undermine their autonomy. Thomas Gibert, a market gardener in Haute-Vienne and spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne, has described the issue as a “major risk” involving the “privatization” of life driven by the “ultra-powerful agribusiness lobby.”
The european parliament’s decision-making process
The European Parliament approved the NGT regulation on June 17, 2026, after rejecting all amendments proposed by Green and Socialist lawmakers. These amendments sought to make traceability mandatory and prohibit patent protection for NGTs, two measures strongly supported by left-wing parties and environmental groups.
The legislation ultimately received broad political support, ranging from the centrist Renew group to the far right, with backing from the European People’s Party. This unusual coalition illustrates how NGTs have transcended traditional political divisions, bringing together pro-competitiveness forces around a technological agenda.
Centrist Member of the European Parliament Pascal Canfin defended the measure, saying, “We have created a sovereign European model for new genomic techniques that will serve our farmers,” underscoring Europe’s geopolitical ambitions in the face of global agricultural powers.
Scientific assessments and the timeline for market introduction
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) endorsed the European Commission’s approach to authorizing NGTs. However, other scientific bodies have adopted a more cautious stance. In 2024, France’s National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) recommended case-by-case evaluations of potential health and environmental risks before any products are marketed.
These differing approaches reflect the lack of a complete scientific consensus regarding the long-term implications of NGTs. Despite the swift adoption of the legislation, several years are expected to pass before foods produced using NGTs actually reach European consumers. The interval between the testing of new varieties and their commercial release will remain substantial.
Balancing innovation and caution
The legalization of NGTs marks a significant shift in Europe’s agricultural strategy in response to climate change and increasing global competition. Yet the move also highlights unresolved tensions between the drive for technological innovation and legitimate concerns regarding the environment, public health, and the concentration of economic power within the food sector.
The challenge now lies in the practical implementation of the NGT regulations. Safeguards such as the prohibition of herbicide-resistant NGTs and their exclusion from organic farming represent important protective measures. Nevertheless, the issue of mandatory traceability remains highly controversial, with major implications for consumer transparency and the protection of small farmers’ interests.
Ultimately, the success or failure of Europe’s NGT experiment will depend largely on the ability of regulators to ensure rigorous oversight, maintain transparent communication with the public, and continuously adapt regulations in light of emerging scientific evidence. Europe has embarked on a narrow path between necessary technological innovation and the precautionary principles that have long defined its approach.
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Hannah Engler Harvey | Longreads | July 30, 2026 | 3,927 words (14 minutes)
In the long, slow days of August, Christmas comes. The halls are decked with vintage glass holiday towns in two colorways, Pastel and Traditional. They are lit by a wall of electric candles whose realistic dancing flames were designed by Disney Imagineers. (Inventory is getting low in Beige, but consider the White as an alternative; Plum could pull double duty for Halloween.) Smiling people wear sweaters embellished with stars and snowflakes. They moan with pleasure as they sample handmade caramel marshmallows and defrosted barbecue ribs and special-edition three-and-a-half pound cheesecakes, on sale for $56.00 or three easy payments of $18.67. (But move fast: There are fewer than 750 left in Strawberry.)
It’s nice here, safe as a daydream. In the pretend kitchen, with the make-believe food and the fireless flames, there is something for everyone.
The first thing to know about QVC, the most important thing, is that it is always on.
My best friend Lizzie and I are couch potatoes, dedicated ones; our friendship set, like a custard, in front of the television. At first it was TheReal Housewives and 30 Rock, then Difficult People and Dancing with the Stars. When we first moved in together, when we were both 24, we resolved, initially, to shake ourselves out of this instinct. I had just gone through my first adult breakup. She had finally had enough of her roommates and of Brooklyn. It was early 2020, the year of broken leases.
We found a place in a neighborhood we both loved, and ignored the fact that the door of the bathroom could not open past the toilet, and that Lizzie had to climb over her bed to get to her closet. It didn’t matter that it was small, we reasoned. We would never be there.
Two weeks after we moved in, the city shut down, and we started paying for cable.
What it boiled down to was this: If you watch enough television, you eventually get sick of deciding what to watch. The beauty of TV, for the true couch potato, is when it comes and finds you: the sick-day marathons of Intervention, the late-night reruns of Frasier and The Nanny, the reliable Sunday-afternoon showing of the movie Backdraft. This is what Lizzie and I had loved about television growing up, and this is what the prestige-TV era had taken from us. We were sick of ordering à la carte. We wanted a buffet.
So, there on our pink Drew-Barrymore-for-Walmart sectional, balancing takeout containers on our laps, we watched.
We watched old episodes of Match Game and Three’s Company; we watched Live with Kelly and Ryan and the movie channels and sports, if we were desperate.
But there were times—the true couch potato always finds times—when the only thing to watch was QVC.
QVC (which stands for Quality, Value, Convenience) was founded in 1986 by the businessman Joseph Segel and still airs 24 hours of programming a day, approximately 20 hours of which are live broadcasts. The broadcasts are simple in structure. A host demonstrates products in an unscripted, conversational way, speaking directly to the audience from a set that looks like a living room. Sometimes, the host banters with a cohost. Along the way, they are joined by a rotating cast of brand representatives who are there to assist in selling their wares.
And this tactic has worked, at least on some tranche of the population. For the 40 years it has been around, QVC’s core demographic—women over 50—has held steady, and the channel has a remarkable ability to inspire loyalty. According to a 2021 article in Main Line Today, the newspaper local to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where QVC is headquartered, “Ninety percent of QVC customers are of the repeat variety.”
The personalities are the point. In a 2006 article in Studies in Popular Culture, Jennifer Courtney and Gabriel Wettach wrote that QVC’s innovation, as well as its biggest challenge, was to make its advertisements seem less like corporate directives and more like recommendations from friends or peers. “To create and maintain credibility with the audience,” they write, “QVC hosts must emphasize roles that convey authenticity, such as mother, beauty expert, or bargain hunter. . . . viewers must be able to trust or ‘relate to’ the host; invoking trusted personas creates a welcoming and reassuring environment.”
We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition.
Twenty years later, this insight about the power of QVC hosts could be applied to far greater swaths of the consumer economy. Today’s Instagram influencers talk about how and when they use certain products in the same relatable way the hosts on QVC do. Shopping is integrated into most online and IRL experiences. We are asked to place things in context, imagine the lives we would have and the people we would be if we could only own the right items.
When I talk about QVC, people are baffled by my interest in it. To them, it seems like a relic, something whose relevance is shriveling up. On the contrary: We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition. We occupy our homes like amnesiacs, trying to figure out who we are by looking around at what we own.
For me, QVC applies an unexpected salve to the wound it caused. I am too young for bladder-leak underwear or anti-crepe elbow cream; I have no lawn for ornaments or freezer space for a four-pound bag of pot stickers. Like most people my age, conditioned to view themselves from a distance, I have spent a lot of time curating my life: my physical space, my wardrobe, my media diet. All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.
To talk about what QVC is does very little to illustrate the experience of watching QVC, which is altogether more difficult to pin down. The sets are vividly lit, the people arranged like pints of ice cream in an illuminated freezer. For as long as I’ve been watching, the main set has been dressed with a bright yellow couch, glossy gray-brown laminate floors, and faux windows that look out onto a digital lawn. The artifice of the environment is in charming tension with flickers of helpless realism: a rep from Roberta’s Unique Gardens who struggles to lift a planter full of SunPatiens; a host whose Barefoot Dreams cardigan keeps rubbing against her mic. There is a hallucinatory quality to it: The brightness is the same at 8 in the morning and 11 at night. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to when they present certain products, whether they’re selling perennial plants or seasonal decorations or Beekman 1802’s goat milk skin care. (The reps from Beekman often bring a flock of real baby goats with them.) But there is also a groundedness, a kind of ruthless maternal practicality: Faroe Islands salmon is full of Omega-3s, which reduce triglycerides, crucial as we approach middle age. Elastic-waist pants are a godsend if you fluctuate sizes.
The presentations follow predictable, elliptical patterns; they are designed to be half-watched, for viewers who are flipping channels, or maybe falling asleep. The hosts repeat themselves—they must—revisiting colors, sizes, quantities, and prices every couple of minutes, the repetition contained within the steady stream of good-natured patter. The consistency of this patter is remarkable; to be able to just keep talking, no matter how boring the topic or useless the product, can be downright impressive to watch. A host might say all of these things and more during the course of an hour-long presentation on espadrille sandals: The weather is getting warmer, those outdoor barbecues are around the corner, days are getting longer, patio dining is here, summer is showing its face, it’s iced coffee season, it’s frozen margarita season, it’s baseball season, the weather is warming up. Sometimes it devolves into silliness. “Belts are really trending right now,” said designer Susan Graver on QVC3 the other morning. “Oh, I love to put one on.”
At first, we entered this world like anthropologists, observing the bizarre habits of the native species. But we soon became attached to its familiar rhythms. Lizzie developed a habit of turning it on in the morning and keeping it on in the background through a day of working from home or cleaning the house, and this routine lingered long after the acute phase of the pandemic began to wane. Certain things about our lives had changed for good. Never again would we go into the office five days a week, and never again would a day pass without the ambient, almost meditative thrum of QVC—not exactly white noise, but maybe ecru, or eggshell.
In other homes, in other cities, we learned, other women were doing the same thing. Longtime QVC customer Arlyn David—a 62-year-old resident of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania—told Main Line Today in 2021: “If I’m home, I have it on.”
All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.
QVC pioneered a new type of television programming, shopping and entertainment churned together in one comfortable swirl. But the entertainment is of a specific type: It provides something that Lizzie and I sometimes call “The Voices.” The Voices could come from a podcast, or from scrolling on TikTok; the point is that they give a restless mind something to do between bouts of more concentrated thought, like psychological chewing gum.
I have spent the last few years learning about how my generation’s attention spans have been torched by social media and smartphones and how our minds now require constant stimulation in order to function. But Arlyn David and her ilk are proof that the desire for The Voices predates millennial dopamine addiction by decades at least. What does the everpresence of QVC do for them?
Whenever I ponder this, I think of the house I grew up in, set back into trees at the end of a cul-de-sac, in an American suburb that thundered with silence. Perhaps The Voices answer a deeper, more basic human desire: the urge to fill a quiet house with conversation, no matter how inane.
Like friendship, QVC has its own vernacular, formed over years and opaque to outsiders. For example: Weighty, substantial fabrics are sometimes referred to by hosts as “beefy.” Host Leah Williams was, by her own account, the first person to use this term. Then QVC stalwart Isaac Mizrahi borrowed it, and then his reps started using it when they went on for their presentations, spreading it back to the hosts. So everyone calls things “beefy” now, usually crepe pants or wool-acrylic blend sweaters. Another one: Cotton has “a dry hand.” This means that when you run your hand over the fabric, it feels dry to the touch, not slick and smooth like a synthetic blend. Fabrics that have a dry hand are cooler and less clingy on the body.
The colors on QVC have beautiful and evocative names, like Butter Rum, Flame, Celebration Pink, Nantucket Blue. Sometimes, when color names are too highfalutin, conflict occurs. The brand rep from the QVC brand Denim & Co. is always going at it with host Amy Stran over this. “This one is called Heather,” he’ll say, and Amy will rush in to offer an alternative: “But it’s really not gray at all, more like a beautiful smoky purple, a lavender.” Then, next time they go through colors, she’ll say, “This one is called Heather, but remember, think lavender.” Amy is very serious about colors. It really pisses her off when brands call black “onyx” or gray “silver.” She probably assumes it will confuse the customers. She is probably right. Whenever these tiffs would happen, Lizzie and I would lean forward over our knees, eager to see the two of them go at it.
If you watch enough, you start to notice these tensions; you become a scholar of them. Lizzie and I are fandom members of the country’s longest-running reality show. The faces of the hosts unfurl themselves under our unrelenting gaze, revealing an ill-advised spray tan, an early pregnancy, plastic surgery, dead teeth. QVC has deepened the language we share with each other, created a shared set of references, in the same way that going to college together did, or the time when we were both AMC A-Listers. It has become more than brainless viewing. It is a hobby.
We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else.
There is even a subreddit dedicated to making fun of QVC personalities and their quirks: r/QVC_Snark. It is a community of insiders. The Redditors attack with the vicious specificity that only intimacy can produce. “Why is her head a literal box?” asks a recent poster, sharing a photo they took of host Courtney Khondabi on their TV screen. Or, of host Rick Domeier: “Rick has been wearing the same jeans for weeks now!” They make fun of the prices, usually during the food presentations ($100 hot dogs, $11 per 6 oz. piece of salmon) and the clothing segments (LOGO by Lori Goldstein is a popular punching bag: “All this needs is some lace and a ‘wide load’ banner across the ass”).
During the three years we lived together, Lizzie and I spent countless evenings performing QVC-themed comedy routines for an audience of one, doing spittakes with our wine, high on the feeling of being clever and understood. But we only discovered r/QVC_Snark later, after we were living on opposite sides of Manhattan. All this time, here were our people! One night I sent her a series of posts I collected during a lurking session, wishing I could see her reaction. After a few seconds, she responded: “Nothing but you has made me laugh this hard since I was a kid.”
Redditors will be Redditors, but look, we are all supposed to be in this together. The hosts and reps are wives and mothers too (or the gay best friends of wives and mothers, or at least the closeted neighbor of wives and mothers). They are wearing the sweaters, using the hand cream, planting the perennials, or at least, they say they are. Part of QVC’s structure—a crucial part, in some readings—is the connection between hosts and viewers, not theoretical, but literal. Almost every live broadcast has a call-in element that allows viewers to speak on-air to their favorite hosts, to ask questions about the product, or, more frequently, praise it and announce their intention to buy more.
“Speaking with a host is, for many callers, a meaningful, seemingly priceless exchange,” write Courtney and Wettach. “Callers frequently divulge personal information, telling the host about illnesses, financial status, and family matters.”
It’s true; I have seen it. A recent caller told QVC personality Kim Gravel, in a voice thick with tears, that she had gotten used to “not feeling part of the world,” due to her weight, but that Kim’s clothing line had given her the confidence to participate in life. “That is your ministry,” said the caller.
I looked up. Ministry! It was such an extreme word, and even odder applied to Kim Gravel. (Boisterous! Brassy! The onetime host of a Lifetime reality show called Kim of Queens where she ruthlessly prepared young girls for beauty pageants!) The longer I thought about it, the more I found myself relenting. Anyone who denies the therapeutic value of clothes that fit has never had the experience of not being able to find them.
This is, perhaps, at the heart of my ambivalence toward QVC, or more accurately, my inability to see my engagement with it as pure ridicule or even a hate-watch. Every so often, I am startled with a reminder of who else is out there watching. Skechers presents a pair of sandals with hands-free slip-on technology, so that you don’t have to bend over to put them on. On the Over 50 & Fabulous program, the women from Breezies sell underwear designed to withstand hot flashes and bladder leaks. Where else can these items be reliably purchased, or so frankly and cheerfully discussed?
Onscreen, listening to the caller’s praise, Kim was nodding. She was clearly touched, or at least, she looked like it.
I sometimes imagine the person I would be if I took them all up on it. If, one day, a tower of packages arrived on my doorstep, containing Women With Control stretch denim, IHKWIP quilted tote bags, Clarks Cloudsteppers shoes, and silicon Cool Grippers pot-holder tongs. How would my life be arranged around these items? I imagine I would measure out the years in landscaping projects. My afternoons would be taken up by long car journeys, ferrying children to softball tournaments or play rehearsals, going to the grocery store and the nail salon.
I know women like this; I grew up with them. So did Lizzie. We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else. We turn up our noses at the strip malls of our youth, and share our faltering moments only with each other: the secret joy of a Target where deodorant isn’t locked behind plexiglass, the frustrated desire to place groceries in the trunk of a car, the fizzy hedonism of a 44-ounce Diet Coke from a fountain. This, too, unites us: our aborted suburban futures, the secret panic that they may have only been deferred. Do we watch QVC to indulge these sublimated cravings for peace and comfort, taking furtive bites of soccer-momdom to keep us going when the subway is delayed and the rent is due? Or do we watch it to set ourselves apart, to reassure ourselves that we will never give in?
What happened within me when I cringed at the caller on the Kim Gravel broadcast? Why was my initial instinct an abstracted pity? Do I think I will never get there—never find a source of unexpected divinity, never be moved to tears by something ridiculous, that the material conditions of my life will never become more complex or more banal? Do I think I will never grow old?
It’s not true that QVC has nothing to offer me. I order my mascara from there, almost exclusively, three tubes for $40 when a single tube of the same mascara at Sephora is $28. Lizzie and I went halfsies on a MacKenzie-Childs teakettle (in the limited-edition Tattoo design) that we gave to a friend for her birthday. They have great prices on Dyson products. And some of the purses are cute.
We do not call in, of course. We order online, like we do everything else.
In April 2026, the QVC Group (which operates the three QVC channels as well as HSN, the Home Shopping Network) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, announcing that the company would be significantly restructured in an effort to reduce its debt (a process which included increasing CEO David Rawlinson II’s total compensation by 70% as they braced for impact). The shopping channels, they insist, will proceed as usual. Despite layoffs of over 900 employees in March 2025, the company says there are no plans for further cuts, and there will be no disruption to the flow of content upon which my fellow QVC-nuts and I have come to rely.
Still, there is danger on the horizon. Change is coming, and has been for a while. The 2000s have not been kind to the networks. There have been lawsuits: In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission barred QVC from making unverified claims about weight-loss products, such as the claim that Lite Bites items like granola bars and shakes enable customers to lose up to 125 pounds, and that Lipofactor Cellulite Target Lotion “causes measurable inch loss from users’ arms, thighs, and abdomens, without the need for a restricted calorie diet or increased exercise.” QVC violated the order, and the government sued in 2004. In 2024, QVC recalled 1.1 million pairs of Temp-tations oven gloves after customers reported burns caused by insufficient heat protection. The 2025 layoffs were preceded by staff reductions in 2023, and in 2020 during the pandemic, when the network also eliminated live programming on QVC2. Something has got to give.
Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?
The rumor on Reddit, at least, is that QVC will continue to invest in its social media platforms, working with fresh-faced TikTok creators while their seasoned hosts languish on cable, tailoring their product pitches to a richer, more sophisticated audience. The transformation has already begun. You can see it in the jewelry presentations (5-stone diamond eternity bands for $8,500), the beauty products (10-pouch boxes of ELEMIS Cellutox Herbal Bath Synergy bath salts for $262), and even the food (lobster tails, filet mignon tips, or 3 lb. of shrimp cocktail for $133). Hosts now talk about the lack of “chemicals” in their bagels, or the importance of building “hair health” with Dyson blow dryers.
Will this work? It seems unlikely. Lizzie and I are the only people we know who watch QVC, let alone shop there. When I brought up the topic to a group of women my age, half of them had never even heard of it. Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?
It turns out I am tender. I do not want QVC to change. There has been too much change already. A couple of years ago, I moved out of the apartment with the pink couch and into a place 13 blocks uptown, with a man who became my husband. Lizzie found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on the other side of the park. I went back to school and made new friends; Lizzie started spending more time in London with her sister. For the first few months in my new home, I tried to watch QVC, but it made me sad: The Voices were still there, but the only voice I wanted to hear was a 30-minute subway ride away.
We reached that inflection point, that warped and curved surface upon which women friendships sometimes teeter. We are at the age where everything gets ruined. Still, we talk all day long, an unending commentary on whatever is in front of us. Our enduring closeness is an anachronism, but a beautiful one. We should not still be here, the way we are, but we are.
I suppose it’s a lesson: Whatever will come will come. For now, it’s August, and Christmas, and there is still so much to do. The flameless candles have sold out in Beige. The man from Bethlehem Lights is here to present his pre-lit trees, stately faux spruces twinkling with proprietary Color Prism illumination technology, 81 color and light combinations, the best time to purchase is now. Why limit this glittering joy to the festive season? Many customers keep their Bethlehem Lights boughs decked all year long: red or orange lights for Harvest Time; red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July.
But you have to act soon. At the end of the broadcast, the eight-and-a-half-foot tree (“their most popular height,” according to the rep) will double in price. Under the bright overhead lights, in their living-room diorama, the people onscreen peer out at me, concern on their made-up faces.
They are worried, but they can’t seem too worried; they want me to pick up the phone, but not panic. This is the beauty of it—of all of it, in fact; this not-urgent urgency, this solvable problem. This is why we watch. The deals are going away, but there is no such thing as an ending. Tomorrow it will be Christmas again.
Hannah Engler Harvey holds an MA in journalism from New York University. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Evergreen Review, Talk Vomit, among other places. She lives in Manhattan.
Editor and fact-checker: Cheri Lucas Rowlands Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
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