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‘A new magazine of psychedelic art and literature’ Psychedelia has a problem: it’s so rooted in its sixties origins that it gets confined to the same youth culture bubble as hippies and drugs—or as one writer in the launch issue of this new magazine notes, ‘images of young white people dancing lethergically to the Grateful Dead.’ It is easily dismissed as just another era, chronologically filed between rock n roll and punk. Elastic reminds us that psychedelia’s sixties heyday was more than the clichés, and actually a time of radical artistic innovation. It isn’t looking back, but picking up the idea and transporting it to the 21st century. Themed ‘Dying’, we’re treated to pieces about the infinitude of grief, the obliteration of the self through sex and childbirth, the weirdness of aging, the horrors of life in Gaza and Ukraine, and more. And just as the art and literature is recontextualised for now, so the visual representation of psychedelia is reassessed. Two of our favourite editorial designers, Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields, have been enlisted to imagine what psychedelic design might mean in 2025. The result is a bridge from the sixties to today, a much-needed antidote to the harsh realities of life in the 2020s. elasticmag.com