Book Highlight: A World Appears by Michael Pollan

4/11/2026

Michael Pollan is one of my favorite public intellectual writers. His writing deals less with telling you answers to problems and instead takes you with him on a path of discovery. Pollan makes difficult theories and concepts very accessible, and I have really enjoyed his last two works exploring the mind and self. His latest book, A World Appears reads like a sequel or a continuation of the themes developed in his previous book, How To Change Your Mind (here is his interview with Klein for that book). Both are fascinating.

Nearing the end of this journey, I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything. I'm abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness...The more I strove to penetrate the mystery, focusing the increasingly narrow beam of my attention on what consciousness is and what it does and how it came to be, the less of it I was actually experiencing - whatever it was...[but] sometimes not-knowing opens us up to possibilities that knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know, closes off...

Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple it can fit into a sentence. I open my eyes and a world appears.