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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan review – Timothy Leary's right hand woman
Of Timothy Leary, we know plenty. How, in the early 1960s, he gave LSD to his psychology students at Harvard, to the inmates of a maximum-security jail to see whether it would stop them reoffending, to artists such as Charlie Mingus and Allen Ginsberg to map how it expanded their creativity. The Beatles' song Tomorrow Never Knows was based on his writings. Mick Jagger flew to Altamont in a helicopter with him. He had perma-smile good looks, evangelical patter and likened himself to Socrates and Galileo. He even had a Pied Piper invitation: 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. No wonder Richard Nixon believed he was 'the most dangerous man in America'. What of Rosemary Woodruff? She was the fourth of his five wives, helping take care of his children in the long wake of their mother's suicide. She buffed the branding of the self-styled 'wisest man of the 20th century'. She fitted him with a hearing aid and sewed his clothing. She helped write speeches and the books that made him a must-read for any would-be prankster or beatnik. In 1970, she aided his escape from prison after he had been landed with a 30-year sentence for possessing drugs. She herself was forced underground for two decades. So much has been written about Leary, observes Susannah Cahalan: why so little about Woodruff? Her life had been eventful long before she met the US's most notorious trip adviser. She was born in 1935 in St Louis, Missouri to a father – Victor the Magician – who performed card tricks at local taverns, and a mother who was an amateur cryptologist. Early on, Woodruff wanted out. She needed, she said, 'things to be grander than they were in my little neighbourhood, in my little home'. She decamped to New York, took amphetamines to ensure she was skinny enough to be hired as a stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, and landed an uncredited role in a naval comedy called Operation Petticoat. Woodruff was looking for otherness. She read Antonin Artaud and science fiction, explored theosophy, smoked cannabis and hung out at jazz clubs. She married a Dutch accordionist who yelled at and cheated on her; then a tenor saxophonist who, when he wasn't shooting up, beat her and cheated, too. 'I subscribed to 'the genius and the goddess paradigm',' she later reflected. 'I wanted genius men.' She met Leary at a gallery and was taken by his talk of 'audio-olfactory-visual alternations of consciousness'. They shared a ride to a psychedelic commune he'd established in upstate New York. What did she hope to find there, he asked. 'Sensual enjoyment and mental excitement.' 'What else?' 'To love. You, I suppose.' The following years are the stuff of legend. Leary titillated and horrified the US in equal measure, telling Playboy readers that women would have hundreds of orgasms during sex on LSD, and claiming that the drug would 'blacken' white people so that they could pursue 'a pagan life of natural fleshly pleasure'. When he ran for the governorship of California against an actor called Ronald Reagan, Woodruff devised the campaign slogan: 'Come together, join the party'. Lauded for her cheekbones and elegance, she fed the press zingy one-liners, and was, says Cahalan, 'a natural high priestess'. Does this add up to the greatness that Cahalan believes Woodruff sublimated during her life with Leary? Cahalan describes him as a 'so-called psychedelic guru' and 'a sweet-talking snake charmer'. Does that make her heroine a gull? Cahalan astutely observes that, for much of the 1960s, 'women were confidantes, calming tethers for the men to embark on frightening journeys into the psychic unknown'. In practice this meant, even when they were on the run, Woodruff ensured Leary never lacked for smoked oysters and fine wines. Like the children of many LSD proselytisers, Leary's son, Jack, got high at a young age. Home life was chaotic. He was so hungry and tired by the time he got to school that he could barely read the blackboard. Meanwhile, Leary's daughter, Susan, taunted Woodruff for being 'frigid and barren', and played Donovan's Season of the Witch at maximum volume for hours on end. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she later killed herself in jail while awaiting trial on charges of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. This is what Yippies co-founder Abbie Hoffman meant when he told Leary: 'Your peace-and-love bullshit is leading youth down the garden path of fascism … ripe for annihilation.' Biographies of lesser-known figures often end up high on their own supply. Their subjects are reappraised as radical, transformative, historical missing links. Cahalan is pleasingly sharp and satiric. She characterises some of Leary's extended circle as 'people who belittled their maids, fed their tiny dogs with silverware, and complained of the cost of shipping priceless art overseas'. Was Leary a visionary who foresaw today's boom in microdosing? 'Psychedelics have become too big not to fail,' Cahalan writes. 'The twin issues that helped curtail the study of these substances in the 1960s are back: evangelism and hubris.' Woodruff and Leary divorced in 1976, but her later life was far from boring. Travelling on a 'World Passport', a document created by peace activists, she zigzagged through Afghanistan where she used a burqa to hide contraband; travelled to Catania where she met a count and 'made love in a secret grotto by a waterfall, drank grape brandy, and helped raise chickens'; to Colombia where she had encounters with venomous spiders and drug cartels. For many years she lay low in the US, lacking social security or health insurance, 'an exile in her native land'. Only in 1994 was she able to emerge from hiding. While she never did publish the memoir she'd been working on for many years, The Acid Queen is a fond, imaginatively researched tribute to her free, forever-seeking spirit. The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan is published by Canongate (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Korea Herald
22-05-2025
- Business
- Korea Herald
OpenAI recruits iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. OpenAI said it is acquiring io Products, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion. Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in 2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997. There, the two forged a partnership that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone. The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI -- a technology driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone's arrival. The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but expect 'physical AI embodiments' that bring generative AI chatbot technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a car, humanoid robot or the AI-powered glasses being developed by competitors Google and Meta, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding that it is too early to know for sure. OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been 'quietly' collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom. In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it 'became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.' That's when Ive co-founded io, which was incorporated in Delaware in September 2023 and registered in California in April 2024, according to state records. OpenAI said it already owns a 23 percent stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but 'will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.' Both OpenAI and Ive's design firm are based in San Francisco. Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup's early years and more recently has been vice president of its 'new product explorations' team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research. Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the 58-year-old designer works out as well as the mind-meld between Jobs and Ive. When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from Jobs' observation that one way to hail humanity is by 'making something with a great deal of care and love.' Ive also chose to base LoveFrom in a historic part of San Francisco, located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such Beat Generation luminaries as 'On The Road' author Jack Kerouac and 'Howl' author Allen Ginsberg. OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived ouster in November 2023, months after io's Delaware incorporation but before the new business was set up in San Francisco. Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue mergers and acquisitions 'and other normal things companies would do.'
The Hindu
22-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5 billion deal
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. OpenAI said it is acquiring io Products, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion. Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in 2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997, where the two forged a partnership that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone. The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI — a technology driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone's arrival. The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but expect 'physical AI embodiments' that bring generative AI chatbot technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a car, humanoid robot or the AI-powered glasses being developed by competitors Google and Meta, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding that it is too early to know for sure. OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been 'quietly' collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom. In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it 'became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.' That's when Ive co-founded io, which was incorporated in Delaware in September 2023 and registered in California in April 2024, according to state records. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but 'will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.' Both OpenAI and Ive's design firm are based in San Francisco. Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup's early years and more recently has been vice president of its 'new product explorations' team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research. Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the 58-year-old designer, works out as well as the mind-meld between Jobs and Ive. When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from Jobs' observation that one way to hail humanity is by 'making something with a great deal of care and love.' Ive also chose to base LoveForm in a historic part of San Francisco, located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such Beat Generation luminaries as 'On The Road' author Jack Kerouac and 'Howl' author Allen Ginsberg. OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived ouster in November 2023, months after io's Delaware incorporation but before the new business was set up in San Francisco. Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue mergers and acquisitions 'and other normal things companies would do."
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5B deal
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. OpenAI said it is acquiring io, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion. Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in 2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997, where the two forged a partnership that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone. The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI — a technology driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone's arrival. The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but it will likely be some kind of 'physical AI embodiments' that bring generative AI chatbot technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a car or a humanoid robot, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding that it is too early to know for sure. OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been 'quietly' collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom. In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it 'became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.' That's when Ive co-founded io with three others about a year ago. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but 'will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.' Both OpenAI and Ive's design firm are based in San Francisco. Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup's early years and more recently has been vice president of its 'new product explorations' team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research. Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the 58-year-old designer, works out as well as the mind-meld between Jobs and Ive. When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from a Jobs' observation that one way to hail humanity is by 'making something with a great deal of care and love.' Ive also chose to base LoveForm located in a historic part of San Francisco, located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such Beat Generation luminaries as 'On The Road' author Jack Kerouac and 'Howl' author Allen Ginsberg. OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived ouster in November 2023. Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue mergers and acquisitions 'and other normal things companies would do." ——- O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. ——— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.
The Advertiser
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
A forgotten travel destination is quietly reinventing itself - and it's working
San Francisco has had a bit of a rough patch. While travellers returned to many classic destinations with a vengeance post-COVID-19, the Californian hub experienced an extended spell of silence, with remote working killing the vibe. But the Golden City is having a bit of a moment in 2025, with three major openings. Sunset Dunes - a 3.2-kilometre, 20-hectare oceanfront park, with murals, installations, and walking and biking paths - has just opened between Golden Gate Park and San Francisco Zoo. Another significant outdoor space with picnic areas, gardens and food trucks, Outpost Meadow is opening in July this year; while the Counterculture Museum - celebrating some of the city's most pivotal movements, from the Beat Generation to Summer of Love - will open on the iconic corner of Haight and Ashbury streets later this year. Perhaps, it's time to head back to San Fran with a vengeance, too.
