The successor is complete. Here's what's new and updated relative to the 2004/2024 original:

Two new sections:

• § IV — The Psychedelic Threshold: draws the 1846 ether analogy in detail against the psychedelic renaissance — MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine/esketamine, the 2024 FDA rejection of MDMA therapy as a modern re-enactment of Horace Wells' failed demonstration, and the unexpected GLP-1 agonist backdoor into mood
• § VII — The Binding Problem: the philosophically deepest addition — argues that curare's nightmare (paralysis without anaesthesia) has a psychiatric analogue, that the hard problem and binding problem demand we take "emotional blunting" on SSRIs very seriously as a potential pharmacological curare effect, and that this actually strengthens the case for germline hedonic engineering over symptom suppression

Updated throughout:

• § III expands The Case for Pain with three contemporary critic-families: the new vitalists (evolutionary psychiatry), the chemical imbalance apostates (Moncrieff et al., 2022), and the authenticity objectors (Kass, Sandel)
• § V updates the conquest of suffering with CRISPR, base/prime editing, He Jiankui's legacy, and the Berridge wanting/liking dissociation
• § VI adds predictive processing / active inference accounts of pain (Friston, Seth)
• § VIII reframes the threshold question from whether to when and how it will be governed

The design uses EB Garamond body text, Playfair Display headings, and a warm parchment palette — scholarly without being spartan.