Psychedelics have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow | John Semley

Mushrooms used to be the territory of hippies, explorers, indigenous people and artists. Now tech bros and wellness gurus have taken over

On a June evening in 1955, an investment banker and amateur mycologist named Robert Gordon Wasson found himself in an adobe house high in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, encountering the divine. That night, Wasson, his wife, the photographer Allan Richardson and about 20 local indigenous people took part in a Mazatec ritual involving psilocybe mexicana, a species of hallucinogenic mushroom. As Wasson recounted in Seeking the Magic Mushroom, his 1957 Life magazine photoessay: "We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck."

In the first episode of The Goop Lab, a new Netflix docuseries tied to actor Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle and e-commerce enterprise, several of Paltrow's employees fly to a Jamaican resort, in search of some modern analogue to Wasson's psychedelic ceremony.