Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Nathan M. Hall, author of the new Path of the Moonlit Hedge. The lowly mushroom is experiencing a celebrity moment lately. Maybe it's because of shows like Star Trek: Discovery, which featured a unique mushroom-based method of space travel, or the relentless efforts of famed mycologist Paul Stamets, who has opened up a generation to the healing and other miraculous powers of fungi. Still, the rootedness of mycophobia—literally, the fear of mushrooms—in much of Western culture has proven hard to undo as evidenced in other popular shows like HBO's The Last of Us, which imagines what would happen if a variety of fungus called cordyceps