Mushrooms don’t grow. They inflate.
You’ve seen it happen. A patch of lawn, a damp corner of a park, the base of a tree you walk past every day. Empty on Monday. Covered in mushrooms on Tuesday. It looks impossible, and for most of human history people assumed it was. Overnight appearances were exactly the kind of thing that got […]
She asked to be buried in a mushroom
A Quiet First in the Blue Mountains On Friday the 4th of September, a family gathered at Springwood Cemetery in New South Wales to say goodbye to a woman named Carolyn. She was 70. Her family asked that her surname stay private. What made the day historic was what she was laid to rest in. […]
She’d tried everything. Nothing lasted more than two days.
Carine Chen-McLaughlin was 65 when she enrolled in the study. She’d been smoking for decades, and she’d tried to stop the way everyone tries to stop. Nicotine gum. The patch. Cold turkey. Nothing held for more than a couple of days. But when she described what made quitting so hard, she didn’t talk about cravings […]
Did mushrooms build the human mind?
The Boldest Claim in Psychedelics. In 1992, an ethnobotanist named Terence McKenna published a book with an idea so audacious that scientists have been arguing about it ever since. His claim: psilocybin mushrooms made us human. Not helped. Not influenced. Made. He proposed that the leap from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens — and everything that came with […]
Green flags your dose is actually working.
It’s the most common question we get, and it’s a fair one. Microdosing doesn’t announce itself. There’s no obvious moment, no clear before-and-after. Which leaves most people quietly wondering whether anything is happening at all. So they look for the wrong signals. They wait to feel something — and a properly dialed dose is specifically the one you […]
Mushrooms vs. Lexapro. Researchers actually ran it.
For years the question hung there unanswered. Psilocybin looked promising for depression — but promising compared to what? Nearly every trial measured it against a placebo or a waitlist. Nobody had put it up against the actual standard of care. So researchers at Imperial College London did. Psilocybin versus escitalopram — the drug you’d know as […]
She wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of being terrified.
Erinn Baldeschwiler was 48 when she said it. She had metastatic breast cancer. She knew what was coming, and she’d made a kind of peace with the outcome — no treatment was going to change it. But there was one thing she couldn’t accept. “The last thing I want is to be terrified and scared […]
A fungus is growing inside Chernobyl’s reactor
In 1986, Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the worst nuclear disaster in history. The radiation was so lethal that humans were banned from a 19-mile zone around it. Nothing was supposed to survive in there. It was a dead place. A no-go zone. A monument to catastrophe. Then, years later, a […]
The summer bucket list nobody made yet
Everyone’s got a life bucket list. Skydiving, Italy, learning guitar someday. But almost nobody makes a summer bucket list—the small, right-now stuff that makes a season feel unforgettable instead of just… passing by. So here’s ours. Five ordinary summer experiences that turn extraordinary when you pair them with a dose. No skydiving required. Just intention, a little […]
