In his “Connections” column in today’s New York Times, Edward Rothstein remembers Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD.

Rothstein reflects on romanticism’s love/hate relationship with technology, and concludes:

It is through technology, not despite it, that LSD visions were realized. [Timothy] Leary called the personal computer “the LSD of the 1990s.” And in a 2006 report in Wired magazine, many early computer pioneers are said to have been users of LSD. Steve Jobs, Apple’s presiding genius, described his own LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important things” he has done in his life. So here it is — a world in which we all do more than just inhale. It is through the iPod that, in Leary’s once contentious words, we turn on, tune in and drop out.