This month, Shortwave is diving into the science of psychedelics.

Chances are you've heard of drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms or psilocybin.

Now some researchers are making new drugs inspired by psychedelic compounds with a key difference.

They're taking out the trip.

We just move things around a little bit here and there.

Hear about how it works on Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Yeah. what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. A warning, this segment contains extensive discussion about rape and sexual assault,

along with some explicit language.

There are a lot of big subjects that I think our culture has trouble talking about.

Death, addiction, wealth, politics.

But one of the toughest, I think, has to be sexual assault and rape.

For how common sexual violence is, it affects over half of women in almost one in three men.

It understandably can be extremely painful and even stigmatizing to discuss.

And in our culture, we see narratives about sexual violence play out in law and order SVU,

in personal essays, or in the headlines.

And there aren't a ton of other scripts out there.

You know, I did feel constrained.

And what I wanted to do was to, like, fight against that

and to sort of challenge myself to not pridify the story

in order to fit accepted form.

...