A New Yorker Writer Hit the Rave Scene

In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt, then in her early 30s, ingested what’s known as a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms and was told, by the mushrooms, that her romantic prospects were basically pitiable and her mission in life was to “observe and report.” She was languishing at the time in a relationship with a hot guy named Matt and writing the searching, entertaining personal essays that would become her first book, “Future Sex” (2016). Meanwhile, her relationship to drugs, men and work was changing, as was the political world around her.