God, Magic Mushrooms, and Me

What will the galaxy far, far away mean to audiences going forward?

View in Browser God, Magic Mushrooms, and Me I fly to Colorado in February of this year. I'm not going to name the city. Colorado passed a proposition in November 2022 decriminalizing a person's possession of psilocybin-laced mushrooms, but the plants' use in religious ceremonies of mainline churches remains taboo. The UCC pastor doesn't want heat. I'll call him Thomas, in honor of the disciple who wrote his own perhaps-hallucinogen-inspired gospel. In late middle age, he still has the broad shoulders and tapered waist and full stride of the college athlete he once was.   Six of us gather at his home, where for the next four days we will eat, sleep, pray, and, when the time comes, ingest the plants. A retired theologian sits next to me at our group dinner on the first night. He's written songs that appear in Protestant hymnals and has taken psilocybin once, last year, after hearing from other friends in the pastoral underworld. The experience was "positive," he tells me—the theologian had sung along to Brahms's requiem as he saw "the mass of redeemed humanity," including his own deceased parents, rejoicing—but not "intense." He wants "a deeper exploration of my faith," he says. Read the Full Story All The President's Men Is Still Disturbingly Vital The first thing Deep Throat says in this film is worth remembering: "Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys. And things got out of hand."   Jesus, did All The President's Men really debut in theaters 50 years ago today? It seems more like five minutes ago.   I rewatched this landmark 1976 thriller last week on the same night Donald Trump appeared in a prime time address to shamble through a litany of excuses and boasts about the United States' war on Iran. It really did make the current president's speech feel like an April Fool's joke. The crime and cover-up exposed in the film—Richard Nixon and his administration's farcical effort to break into the headquarters of Democratic rivals in Washington D.C.'s Watergate hotel—seems almost quaint by comparison to Trump's nonstop cascade of idiotic failures and malignant falsehoods. Read the Full Story The Lost Art of Going Bald I, like many men, can recall with perfect clarity when I first realized I was losing my hair. On a sweaty summer night in college, friends and I were playing drinking games in our dingy apartment. For some reason, the conversation jumped to my buddy's hairline, which culminated in a curly black widow's peak.   "I have one too," I replied, pushing the dark bangs back from my forehead. A pause ensued. Did they know something I didn't? "Oh, honey," said that same buddy's girlfriend. "That's not a widow's peak. That's a receding hairline."   That night birthed a morning ritual. Wake up, look in the bathroom mirror, push hair back, think, hope, pray: It's not that bad. The denial ran deep, though not deep enough to avoid buying thickening shampoo—just in case. Poor kid. If only he realized it wouldn't do jack shit. Read the Full Story My Best Friend Lived an Extraordinary Life. Why Did He Take It So Soon? In 1989, my twin brother and I started first grade at Allen-Stevenson, an all-boys school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. We were placed in separate classrooms, so none of our classmates knew we were twins. At lunch, a boy in my class approached me with a wide-eyed expression. "I don't want to freak you out," he said, "but there's a kid in the other class who looks just like you."   The boy's name was Will Sargent. Earlier that day, I had noticed he was the only one sitting backward in his chair. He wore white Converse Cons high-tops and a sailor's-knot bracelet. Will was the most popular kid in our class by a country mile. In fifth grade, when elected to the student council, he and the other class representatives had to choose inspirational quotes to appear next to their photos in the yearbook. The other boys picked sayings such as "Patience is a virtue" and "All for one, one for all." Will chose a line from the 1993 movie The Sandlot: "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die." Decades later, that would turn out to be true. Just probably not in the way Will expected. Read the Full Story What I've Learned: Arsenio Hall I don't regret one thing. I tried to kick the door open and let everybody in.   Spike Lee called me an Uncle Tom.   When you first go to Paramount and say, "Okay, the acronym is Niggas With Attitude, and they have a song called Fuck tha Police," that meeting is over. Back then, I didn't have the power to make that meeting go any further. Later on, Ice-T called me. He was going through the "Cop Killer" saga and he wanted to come on and explain it. He kicked some knowledge that day and helped people understand something about young Black men and hip-hop. At that point, the show was so hot, when Paramount said, "We're not talking about 'Cop Killer,' " I'm like, "Yes, we are." And then it started changing. Read the Full Story Tim Cook (Still) Believes in Crazy Ideas "It's definitely still his company," Tim Cook, Apple's CEO since shortly before Jobs's death at fifty-six from pancreatic cancer in 2011, says of his relentless predecessor, whose star burned so bright you wonder if he knew it wouldn't last. It's the morning after the Neo unveiling in New York, and Cook is sitting in an open café area at Apple's $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California. Only a few fellow employees sit at tables just out of earshot, AirPods in their ears, laptops open, coffee at their elbows. The café is somewhere on the continuum of the grand ring-shaped building, which feels as if it either just landed or is about to take off for its home planet. Outside, through one of the forty-five-foot glass panels that constitute the building's facade—a foundry in Germany had to build a custom oven to make them—drought-resistant indigenous oak trees, selected by Jobs himself, shade jogging trails and lawns.   "I think about him often—and in the last few months, thinking about the fiftieth anniversary, even more so, honestly," Cook says. "You think about the things he believed in. He believed in the simple, not the complex. He believed in collaboration, that if you put a small group of people together, the output of that small group would be much greater than any individual among them." Read the Full Story Follow Us Unsubscribe | Manage Preferences | Privacy Notice | CA Notice at Collection Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines. ©2026 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. 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