“But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’” In the NYT, critic Edward Rothstein sings the praises and surveys the notoriety of “the green muse,” absinthe, which is apparently making a legal comeback both here and in the EU. “Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another.“