“I got mad questions for you,” said Kanye West. Fiona Apple said, “No.” Apple was supposed to be asking the questions. This was the whole thing. The two artists had never spoken before, and she’d never interviewed anyone. But here, Kanye West and Fiona Apple both had new albums coming out, so Interview put the two of them on the phone together. She asked him some fairly quotidian things — about speaking in public, about how much sleep he got, about what kinds of dreams he had. But Kanye West knew that he was on the phone with Fiona Apple, and he wanted to make a moment out of hit. Their mutual collaborator Jon Brion came up in conversation, and Kanye West told Fiona Apple, “I actually wanted to work with him so I could be like the rap version of you. That was one of my main goals.”

Kidnapping naked children and throwing them into vans is what you would do if you were a child sex trafficker, and unless proven otherwise, sure looks like ICE is doing that.

Let's be clear: there is no "gang" as criminal or as dangerous as ICE is. https://t.co/99ExX5sCMM

— Jonathan 'Boo and Vote' Cohn (@JonathanCohn) October 2, 2025

Dan Jones was jolted awake around 1 a.m. Tuesday to the sound of federal agents trying to break through his apartment door. They couldn’t get past his double lock, so he went back to bed.

But when he woke up hours later for work, he walked out and found broken doors littering the hallway — and his neighbors missing.

Jones, 27, is among the residents left at 7500 S. South Shore Drive who are trying to piece together what remains after an early morning, high-powered federal immigration raid led to the arrests of dozens of their neighbors at their South Shore apartment building.

Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.

When he got home from work, Jones said he entered his unit to find all of his electronics and furniture missing, and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor. Jones said he had no idea who took his belongings and hadn’t received answers from Chicago police.

“I’m pissed off,” Jones said. “I feel defeated because the authorities aren’t doing anything.”

On Wednesday, toys, shoes and food were still in piles in the building’s hallways. Property managers were seen throwing mattresses and broken doors into dumpsters. . . .

In the South Shore raid, neighbors said federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through the building and several drones and helicopters were deployed.

Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street, said it “looked like hundreds” of agents were outside her front door.

Watson said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers, she said.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Watson. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”

Watson said she went into the building to help one of the residents and was shocked by what she saw.

“Stuff was everywhere,” said Watson. “You could see people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”

The rationale here is that there were some Venezuelans living in the building, so naturally they must be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, even though a recent in-depth investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times found basically no evidence that the gang has any real presence in Chicago.

As Cohn points out, there is a dangerous gang roving the streets of our cities — and they’re the paid agents of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, who are the two people most directly responsible for these atrocities. (I’m sure they show the demented drooling King Leer who is their putative boss plenty of fascist porn produced by these raids).

The post Fascism in theory and practice appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

bayesic-bitch:

Starting my speech at the Omelas city council with a child acknowledgement statement

She’s coming for the mayor’s office. by Hannah Murphy Winter

It’s 7 o’clock on August 5, the night of the Seattle primary election. Most local candidates are hosting their election night parties at industrial-style bars and breweries across Capitol Hill or Ballard, but not mayoral hopeful Katie Wilson. This room in Beacon Hill looks like it was set up for Bingo Night, or a particularly hype, politics-themed children’s birthday party. 

And it actually is a particularly hype, politics-themed children’s birthday party. Wilson is sitting at a table, pinning the tight bun her hair is always tied into, when someone carries over a little girl in a cotton floral dress and sets her down. Josie is celebrating her second birthday tonight, watching the scene from the floor, wide-eyed and a little over it.

Balloons are taped to the wall and tied to the backs of plastic chairs. Streamers hang haphazardly by her yellow campaign signs.

Campaign staff, volunteers, and a handful of other candidates for city office mill around the open space, snacking on hummus and veggies and cashing in their drink tickets for beer and wine. A truck outside is selling pizza, a nod to an early campaign video about why a slice can be as much $8 in Seattle now. It’s all so scrappy, just like her. 

At 8 p.m., the packed room quiets. The ballot count will drop any minute. For months, Wilson was fighting a narrative as much as she was fighting incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. He was entrenched, unbeatable, the institution. She was the progressive upstart without a shot. Early polling showed that voters liked her message, but were barely familiar with her name. Refreshing the King County election website on their phones, the room was eager to know if that narrative was right.

At 8:05, a woman yells: “Katie’s number one!”

The crowd erupts.

Wilson walks to a podium at the back of the community center through a chanting crowd that’s already closing in around her. Her bag is still on her shoulder and she’s wordlessly looking toward her team in the crowd.

When the cheering quiets down, she brings the mic to her mouth, and looks over to her campaign staff. “Are we really at 46 percent?”

The crowd roars. 

“Wow, that’s a lot better than I expected,” she says. 

Wilson finding out she beat Harrell  in the primary. BILLIE WINTER Wilson’s husband celebrates with their daughter. BILLIE WINTER

The general rule of Seattle politics is that older moderates vote early, and younger progressives vote right before the deadline. The first ballot drop skews conservative. An hour earlier, Wilson told me she hoped to be a few points behind Harrell that night, catch up in the next few days, and overtake him in the end.

She didn’t expect to be almost a point and a half up.

“Okay, so we’re headed to the November ballot,” she says to the room.

In the end, she took more than 50 percent of the total vote, leaving Harrell almost nine points behind her.

***

  The Friday after election night, I met Wilson at her campaign office in the Smith Tower: a room of mostly empty desks that’s 20 by 20 feet, at most. She’d shared this office with city attorney candidate Rory O’Sullivan and city council candidate Jamie Fackler, but neither of them got through the primary. She’d spent the last four days catching up on the 150 “congratulations” texts from everyone she knew, and quite a few people she didn’t know. Frontrunners are more interesting than upstarts. 

Sitting at a desk, looking toward City Hall Park, she started from the beginning. 

Wilson was raised in Binghamton, New York, in a home steeped in academia. Both of her parents were evolutionary biologists. Her mom, Anne Barrett Clark, studied birds, and she specialized in redwing blackbirds when Wilson was in grade school. “I have a lot of memories of tramping around her field site, helping her to put little bands on baby birds, or weigh them, measure them,” Wilson says. Today, her mom is focused on crows’ social behavior. 

I ask about her dad.

“He’s actually quite well-known,” she says, uncomfortably. 

In the 1970s, the biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a blockbuster pop-sci hit that argued that our very genes, the genes of animals, of plants, all strive for immortality. Living things are completely governed by our own self-preservation. And as a result, everyone and everything is selfish by design. His arguments have been co-opted by every libertarian and cheating ex-boyfriend to explain their rugged individualism for the 50 years since. 

Wilson’s dad, David Sloan Wilson, made his career arguing against Dawkins’s theory. 

Essentially, he developed a counter-theory that altruism—rather than selfishness—can be a product of natural selection. His publications on the subject span from 1980 to 2022. And in his 2011 book, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, he helps find practical ways that evolutionary biology can be applied to the world around you. 

“The thrust of my dad’s work is showing that, from a scientific, biological point of view,” Wilson says, “noble, moral motivations are real. And that there’s an evolutionary basis for that.” 

It’d be easy to try to draw a connection between Wilson’s dad’s work and her own politics. A household driven by the belief that community-mindedness is inherent to our biology seems like it could create little leftists straight out of the womb. 

But when I ask Wilson, she tells me I’m off base. Yes, her household shaped her politics. but not in the way I thought. 

She took three essential gifts from her parents, and in spite of them: a refusal to trust authority just because it’s authority, an ambivalence to the ideas of status and money, and a refusal to follow her parents into the world of academia. 

From her vantage point, her parents seemed so separated from their subjects, and she wanted to make a tangible impact. “They were genuinely in it because they want to understand how the world works,” she says, but “they were in this ivory tower, right? They’re thinking about things, but there’s a lot about the world that I think they didn’t understand. And that I didn’t understand either, because I hadn’t been in it.” 

In high school in Binghamton, she started to get involved in the anti-consumerist, anti-globalist movements of the ’90s, the way that teenagers do when they have a strong sense of moral justice and nowhere to put it. When she was 15, she cofounded a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a sort of freegan, and vegan, soup kitchen that made free meals for the community. 

That’s where she met her now-husband, Scott Myers. At the time, Myers was a self-described punk, with a touch of rockabilly. “My hair was greased up like Elvis or something.” And the chapter was serving food at an animal rights protest against a circus that was coming through town. His first impression of Wilson? “Well, she was wearing Birkenstocks and socks,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘This is a weird person. I’ve never met someone like this.’”

When I ask Myers if, in any way, she’s still the same person he met that day, he, like anyone who’s known someone for 30 years, struggles to find an answer that could fairly capture decades of growth. But he’s easily able to paint one clear throughline from that teenager at the circus: “If she’s ever ambitious,” he says, “it’s never for her own reasons. It’s always about trying to do the most good for the most people.” 

The two went to different high schools, but that meeting started a relationship between the unlikely pair that would last, off and on, through their adult lives. (Wilson and Myers describe their teen romance as “a complicated, adolescent relationship” and “tortured, teenage, fits and starts,” respectively.)

At that point, Wilson still appeared to be on the same academic track as her parents. She graduated from Binghamton High School as the salutatorian, and headed straight to Oxford University to study philosophy and physics (“to get to the bottom of things,” she says). But when it came time to graduate, Wilson considered her parents’ ivory tower again. She didn’t want to be “looking down on the world and trying to understand it,” she says. “I wanted to get my hands dirty.” 

And this is where her rejection of her parents’ careers in academia came to a head: Six weeks before graduation, Wilson dropped out of college.

Wilson (second from right) after her first-year exams at Oxford.  COURTESY OF KATIE WILSON

“As I got toward the end of my time at Oxford—that’s the time when people are thinking about what they do next, right? Are you gonna go and apply for graduate school or get a job with McKinsey? And so as I got into my final year, as I was having those thoughts, it was like, ‘Well, I’m not doing any of that.’” And so she decided to make sure that that wasn’t an option. 

“I have to admit I was at least a little bit of a bad influence on her,” Myers says, sheepishly. While Wilson was in college, he’d gotten his GED, moved to the Bay Area, and gotten deeper into the protest movements of the early 2000s. His life looked drastically different than hers: He was busking on the BART and volunteering at an Indian reservation. “I’m happy it didn’t wreck her life,” he says. “She had to work jobs that she probably wouldn’t have worked, and get a different perspective on life, and on how a lot of people live and make a living. It might look less prestigious, but I think it’s shaped her a lot… But if my daughter did it, I would be like, ‘Don’t do that.’”

“No regrets,” Katie tells me. “And my parents have forgiven me for it, at this point,” she says, in a way that makes me wonder if it really did take until she was in her 40s.

***

Dropping out of college did exactly what she wanted it to do. Like flipping a railroad switch, she veered away from a life that seemed to be inevitably barrelling toward prestige and academia, and into the life of someone who wasn’t raised for Oxford from birth. 

Wilson and Myers got married in 2004 and took what they call a “Greyhound Honeymoon,” busing from city to city to decide where they would start their new life. That city, it turns out, was Seattle. 

They landed here because, at the time, it was affordable, and because it had an accessible university library system where they could continue their education on their own (which Wilson describes as sometimes “inefficient and weird,” but also a valuable way to fill in some of the gaps that her two majors left). 

Their youthful self-education was driven by a central question: Why did the political movements they were a part of in the ’90s and aughts die in the water, and what did it take to make a social movement successful? They’d been involved in the Wolrd Bank protest in 2000, the anti-war movement after the invasion of Iraq, “and we were both somewhat disillusioned with the results of those movements,” Wilson says. “And so we made a joint decision to figure out, ‘How do we change the world?’” 

They knew the key was organizing worker power. “We were inspired by the labor movement of the 20th century and the Civil Rights Movement,” she says, “but the world today is not like it was in the 1930s and the 1960s.” What was 2004’s organizing principle? Could they organize Walmart and other big box stores? Could they organize service workers?

But in the meantime, they had to make a living. In Seattle, Wilson’s first job was as an office assistant at an environmental science laboratory, followed by a brief stint at the Seattle Yacht Services, buffing hulls, painting boat bottoms, and repairing yachts. 

But her mainstay for a few years was construction. She started out as an apprentice carpenter with a general contractor in Eastlake, renovating apartments. “This was a shady fucking worksite,” she says. The building itself was probably made as a hotel for the World’s Fair in 1962, she says, and then converted into apartment buildings. This time, their crew was turning studio apartments into one-bedrooms and flipping the building. “They were so cheap, they didn’t even buy us ladders,” she says. “So if we were doing work on the ceiling, we had to stand on five-gallon buckets.” 

Looking for a construction job that felt less like a death trap, she emailed Mike Cain, a local contractor who had posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a construction laborer. She wrote: 

I have some experience with framing, and I am proficient with both a hammer and a nailgun. I did a lot of drywall (both new and repairs), taping, mud, spray texture, painting (spray, roller, and brushwork), cheap flooring, and window trim and baseboard installation. I did demolition and, in general, a lot of carrying heavy things from one place to another… I am strong and competent and I am a hard worker. I learn very quickly, and I have a sharp eye for detail when necessary.

She ended the email: “I have my own tools - a cordless drill, a small skil-saw, a carpenter’s belt, lots of hand tools, and personal safety gear. I have a drivers license, but no car. I commute by bike and I live in North Seattle, which is within easy biking distance from University Village. I am very punctual and reliable…I would be available to start work immediately.” She asked for $15 an hour, but she’d take $12 “for a trial period.”

When I ask Cain what he remembers most about her, he tells me about their face-to-face interview, at the job site. He knew she’d recently moved across the country, and he remembers asking her what she was doing in Seattle. “I’m going to unionize Walmart,” she told him. “That was so cool,” he says. “‘You got the job,’ [I told her], just on the basis of that. Just her spirit and her spunk and everything. I was like, you look like you can lift 50 pound things over and over and over again all day.”

Wilson ended up working for Cain for six months. And she didn’t unionize Walmart. Instead, it took many patient years before she found an entry point to start organizing worker power in Seattle. In 2011, after the Great Recession pushed King County to take up austerity measures, the county was planning to cut Metro bus routes—a direct hit on working people. 

“It was personal to us,” Wilson says. “We didn’t have a car, so it legit affected us. And then we just thought, ‘Okay, let’s organize transit riders.’” 

Wilson and Myers would eventually run a number of successful campaigns, working within the complex ecosystem of city budgets, policy makers, and communities. When these two now-seasoned organizers talk about their first campaign, they can only see the mistakes they made with that first effort. At the time, “we didn’t know the details of real-world politics,” Myers says. “The political stuff we were in when we were younger was like: make a banner, go to a protest, make a pot of food. We didn’t know anything about taxes and revenue and any of this stuff, so we just dove into it.”

Wilson’s first campaign (and yes, they still have these shirts). COURTESY OF KATIE WILSON

For the “Save Our Metro” campaign, Myers says, “we spent a whole week just flyering down on Third Ave.—the big bus corridor—putting up posters and talking to bus riders. We didn’t know how to organize or anything, so we just thought, ‘Oh, we’ll do this, and all these people will show up to our rally.’ And then like 30 people showed up.” 

They hadn’t even learned to collect contact information from protesters yet (“We thought that was cynical, or something,” Myers says). But some of the protesters wanted to keep fighting for their transit system. “It was a lot of figuring it out as we go,” Myers says. “It took us a year to figure out how to write a constitution and bylaws.”  

And that’s how the Transit Riders Union was born. 

***

For someone who has been in politics, but not a politician, for years, Wilson is rather private. The Transit Riders Union is where Wilson’s story starts for Seattle’s political left. Her brainy family, walking away from prestige, her blue-collar jobs, the long journey of political discovery—it’s not just less a part of her campaign than pizza, it’s not part of her campaign at all. 

The first glimpse I got of just how much we didn’t know about Katie Wilson was at a political forum called Candidate Survivor. Hosted by The Stranger and the Washington Bus, the forum includes a talent portion, where candidates are asked to perform. Wilson walked on stage with a guitar over her shoulder and a harmonica in a holder around her neck. She used to busk at Pike Place Market, she told the crowd. It’d been 10 years, though, she said, “so give me some grace here.” And she dove into a bluegrass standard. 

Wilson at Candidate Survivor in July. WEST SMITH

How could someone running for Mayor of Seattle go months without telling voters that they’d been a busker at Pike Place Market? It’s the kind of narrative that politicos fall over themselves for. The stories that tell voters that this person really is a real person, not just a pile of ambition in a suit. 

That’s a choice. Wilson has been running her campaign like she’s campaigned for minimum wage, progressive revenue, and renter protections. They were never centered on a person or personality, because that wasn’t the point. It was to build coalitions, find where groups had common goals, and pull power out of people by showing them that they agree with one another. That’s her special sauce. When her campaign broke out into the national media, The Nation magazine said she “launched her campaign like a social movement,” an exercise in “new progressive pragmatic political power.” 

And it’s certainly not the only way she breaks from the Seattle mayoral tradition. Former mayor Jenny Durkan owned a $7.5 million mansion on Whidbey Island. Harrell bought his Seward Park home in 2011 for $1.4 million. Ed Murray owned his home on Capitol Hill and a vacation home on the Peninsula. Wilson and Myers rent a one-bedroom apartment in Capitol Hill. When they moved there in 2018, it was the first time in years they didn’t have housemates—a luxury they were only able to afford because that year, the Transit Riders Union was able to start paying her for her work. The apartment has four rooms: a kitchen, a living area, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Maybe four and a half, if you consider the small living room nook where Josie’s toys and clothes are tucked away. 

Her building was built in the 1920s—a three-story walkup that was meant to help address a severe housing shortage at the time. It’s full of simple, original details: arched doorways, natural wood trim, and a built-in linen closet. And that’s just the bones. Myers was laid off during lockdown, and he used that time to single-handedly turn the apartment into an old-world, maximalist dream—ornate wallpaper cornstarched to the walls, painted ceilings, saturated velour couches. Their kitchen has two refrigerators and two ovens because Myers regularly makes homemade bagels and pizza. It’s all DIY and secondhand. And it works. 

But it’s also so small. Two people can’t be in the kitchen together without getting tangled. Their mattress sits on the floor. Josie sleeps in a Pack ’n Play in their bedroom until they go to sleep. Then when it’s time for them to go to bed, they carefully move her, Pack ’n Play and all, into the living room, where she sleeps for the rest of the night. They haven’t figured out what happens when she outgrows the Pack ’n Play, but they’re confident they will. They do a lot with a little. 

Wilson and Myers haven’t figured out what they’ll do when Josie outgrows her Pack ’n Play. COURTESY OF KATIE WILSON

The same can be said of Wilson as an organizer. She knows that understanding the world—whether in academia or in politics—is about knowing what she doesn’t know. And she follows that by finding the one person who knows the most about that thing, and makes them a part of her coalition. That’s how she got the city to buy in to subsidized Orca cards, renter protections, raising the minimum wage—every seemingly pie-in-the-sky victory that the Transit Riders Union won.

Until her mayoral campaign, she’d never had a team—even a small one—that was fully dedicated to the cause. “You need to herd cats, to get them all doing their thing. And when it’s a coalition, then there’s lots of organizations who are being paid to do the work as part of their time,” she says.

The challenge, then, was taking the sliver of attention that that incredibly talented group of people could give to her cause, and making it as effective as possible. And it worked. Like she told me the day before she announced her campaign for mayor: “I would be happy to put my legislative record up against Bruce Harrell’s any day of the week.”

Wilson decided to run for mayor after Harrell opposed the  social housing proposition that ultimately got almost two-thirds of Seattle’s vote. Wilson saw it as the biggest fumble in his term, and a clear sign that Harrell was out of touch with the voters in Seattle. And maybe that meant he was vulnerable to a progressive challenger. She went home that night and told Myers what she was thinking. “I told her, ‘If you run for mayor, I’ll divorce you,’” Myers says. “But we stayed up all night long talking about it, and by the end of the night, I told her, ‘If you don’t run for mayor, I’ll divorce you.’” 

“Honestly, I’m more worried about my ability to put together a mayoral wardrobe than I am running the city,” she told me, gesturing at the combination of Goodwill finds she was wearing that day. “I know so many highly skilled, competent people, people who’ve worked in City Hall for decades. I’m so confident in our ability to assemble this team, and really excited about it.”

The people she’s worked with over the last decade reflect that same confidence. When she launched her campaign, scores of people who’d worked with the Transit Riders Union sang her praises. And of course, Cain, the contractor, gave her the most glowing endorsement of all. “Katie Wilson is smart, tough, running for mayor…and a former Mike Cain Construction employee,” he wrote on Facebook after she announced her campaign. “She was outstanding at moving heavy stuff around job sites.”

When I talked to Cain, he talked about Wilson’s intelligence, her spunk, and how interested he was in how she found herself working in construction in Seattle. “Especially since she’d just dropped out of Oxford,” I added. The voice on the other side of the phone was silent. “I actually didn’t know that,” he said, with a note of surprise. 

There’s a lot to be surprised by from Katie Wilson. Her ability to play guitar and harmonica at the same time. Her taste in home decor. That her favorite movie is Orson Welles’s 1965 Chimes at Midnight. I’m confident her parents and her Oxford professors have been floored by her at least once.

When I first arrived at her apartment, she popped her head out of the doorway and waved me in. Her hair is usually tied into a careful knot at the back of her head with a series of bobby pins. But when I got there, her hair was still down. To my surprise, when it wasn’t wound into her signature bun, it fell almost all the way down her back. 

While I watched her pin her hair up, I was reminded of the final impression Myers wanted to leave me with when we spoke. “I don’t pay very close attention to all the media. She might seem, on the exterior, staid and unflappable,” he says. “But inside, she’s a really passionate person,” he says. And she’s coming for the mayor’s office.

Paul Stamets might never have found his life topic if he hadn’t been a painfully shy boy. As a child, he had a severe stutter and dreaded social interactions, spending much of his time staring at the ground. What he found there would come to define his life: Mushrooms. Today, at 70, Stamets is arguably the world’s most famous mycologist, a man whose evangelism for fungi has turned him into both a scientific innovator and a pop-culture icon.

His path to this unlikely role was far from conventional. In his teens, he experimented with psychedelic mushrooms. After eating an entire bag of them, the 17-year-old became so intoxicated that he climbed a tree and couldn’t come down until the effects wore off. As a thunderstorm broke open the sky, he experienced a profound connection with the forest and the universe. “Mushrooms have been central and important to my life ever since,” he later said in an interview, crediting psychedelics with curing his stutter and fear of speaking.

From those chaotic forays grew a disciplined fascination. After studying mycology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, he became a logger in Washington State, then an author, inventor, entrepreneur and visionary whose work has convinced many that fungi may hold answers to some of humanity’s biggest challenges: Cancer, pollution, even climate change. While most think of mushrooms as dinner ingredients, in his 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Stamets lays out how fungi can be game-changers in medicine, environmental cleanups and the future of the planet. 

His enthusiasm for mushrooms as mysterious, often underestimated phenomena is infectious. Fungi can grow larger than a dozen blue whales or remain too small for the human eye. They can kill other beings and plants, or nurture them with nutrients. Out of an estimated three million or so species of fungi, only about 14,000 mushroom species have been identified. “Beneath our feet lies a vast, invisible world that’s vital to life on Earth,” Stamets wrote in July. “These fungi form underground networks that nourish forests, store carbon and support over 80 percent of plant life. Yet fewer than 10 percent of their biodiversity hotspots are protected. It’s time we recognize fungi as essential allies in conservation and climate solutions.” 

Fungi are as vital to human health as they are to planetary health, according to Stamets. From his home and mushroom farm near Olympia, Stamets has spent decades promoting medicinal mushrooms, most famously in connection with his mother’s illness. In 2009, Patty Stamets was diagnosed with advanced Stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her liver and sternum. Doctors gave her three months to live. Alongside chemotherapy and Herceptin, she took daily doses of Turkey Tail mushroom, grown and prepared by her son. A year later, her scans showed no detectable cancer and she lived for ten more years until she died at 93 years old. In a TEDMED talk in 2011, wearing his signature mushroom-felt hat, Stamets called it “the most important story of my life.”

Researchers caution that this is a single case and that mushrooms should not be seen as a cure on their own. But clinical studies have indeed shown that Turkey Tail can stimulate immune function in women with breast cancer and improve recovery from radiation. “Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics,” Stamets says, pointing out that penicillin and statins originated from fungi. He was the first to discover that a rare North American mushroom, Agarikon, protects against smallpox and related viruses, even attracting the interest of the government’s BioShield program. His supplement company, Host Defense, markets capsules of reishi, lion’s mane and other fungi to support immunity.

But Stamets’s vision goes beyond medicine. “Mycelium is the Earth’s natural internet,” Stamets likes to say, referring to the vast underground networks through which fungi exchange nutrients with plants. He believes harnessing that intelligence could help restore damaged ecosystems. On his 40-acre farm, he has experimented with fungal filters that purify farm runoff. 

Indeed, Stamets is a pioneer of mycoremediation, the use of fungi to clean up toxins. In the late 1990s, on a polluted lot in Bellingham, Washington, he seeded oil-soaked soil with Oyster mushroom spores. Within weeks, the once-black, stinking earth sprouted mushrooms and laboratory tests showed 95 to 99 percent reductions in petroleum hydrocarbons. “The pile no longer stank. Five weeks later, plants began to grow on the mushroom-inoculated pile: The mushrooms had attracted insects, who had laid their eggs in the fruits. When those eggs had hatched, the larvae had attracted birds, whose feces had brought plant seeds. Our mushroom-treated pile was the only one to flourish and rebound as an oasis of life,” Stamets explained. Other experiments have shown that mycelium can filter bacteria and heavy metals from polluted water.

Stamets has also patented fungal strains that kill termites and carpenter ants by infecting them with spores — offering an alternative to toxic pesticides. “We need to enlist fungi to help us, rather than fighting them,” he told Scientific American.

His ideas have inspired entrepreneurs. Designers have built furniture, surfboards, even bricks from fungal composites, and many of them cite Stamets’s 2005 Mycelium Running book as their bible.

Stamets’s blend of science, storytelling and showmanship has made him a star well beyond academic circles. He has given multiple TED talks with millions of views. He holds an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine and dozens of patents. In 2014 he received the Bioneers Award for environmental innovation.

And in pop culture he received the highest honor there is — writers for the Star Trek: Discovery series called him for help with a story plot and honored him by naming the fictional “astromycologist” who navigates a spaceship via a universe-spanning mycelial network Lieutenant Paul Stamets. The real Stamets, a lifelong Star Trek fan, happily agreed. Long before that, he had built his cabin in British Columbia as a homage to the Starship Enterprise.

Not all scientists share Stamets’s enthusiasm. Critics argue that some of his claims are overstated or rest on small pilot studies rather than peer-reviewed, large-scale trials. There’s potential, but we need rigorous science, oncologists often caution. Even Stamets acknowledges the need for more data. “We’re still very much in kindergarten when it comes to understanding how to co-create a sustainable future for all beings — and all beings are necessary to make that future possible,” he says in the documentary Fantastic Fungi.

Yet his influence is undeniable. Psychedelic therapy trials at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere are bringing psilocybin — the active compound in magic mushrooms — into mainstream medicine for depression, PTSD and addiction. Mushroom-based supplements are now a billion-dollar industry. Environmental scientists are increasingly studying fungi’s role in carbon cycling and soil health.

For Stamets, the message is urgent. He often repeats: “Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet.” If we pay attention, he believes, they may help us survive. “Through the genius of evolution, the Earth has selected fungal networks as a governing force managing ecosystems,” he writes in his book Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.

For someone once too shy to lift his eyes from the ground, Stamets has become a remarkably visible spokesman for life on the forest floor. Whether through cancer therapies, green materials, or the fertile imaginations of science fiction, his vision has spread like mycelium itself — quietly, steadily and with astonishing reach.

The post The Granddaddy of All Things Mushroom appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.