Mike Jay

The​ word ‘vampire’ entered common parlance in the Anglophone world in 1732, as sensational reports arrived via German newspapers about an episode on the Serbian front in the wars between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. A soldier called Arnaut Pavle had died after breaking his neck falling from a hay wagon. It was said that he had been troubled by vampires throughout his life...

On​ the remote island of Siberut off the west coast of Sumatra, the Mentawai have a well-documented tradition of shamans: individuals known as sikerei heal people by communing with spirits. Manvir Singh, in the middle of his doctoral research in human evolutionary biology, went there in 2014 to undertake fieldwork. Sikerei were easy to spot, with their long hair, loincloths, strings of beads...

The Shipibo-Konibo​ people, who live along the banks of the Ucayali river in Peru, are one of several Amazonian groups whose art is intimately connected to their use of ayahuasca, a vision-inducing brew of jungle vines and leaves that contains the mind-altering compounds harmaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Their textiles and ceramics are characterised by kené, geometric patterns...

Why​ do we sleep? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the...

In​ 1770 a new perfume shop opened in the centre of Paris on the rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, a fragrant oasis adjoining a district that was, according to one contemporary, ‘by far the worst-smelling place in the world’. This stretch of the Right Bank was home to an abattoir, a fish market, a butcher, an overcrowded prison and a mortuary, whose combined effluvia flowed...