Rolling Stone sent Pinchbeck to Burning Man in 2000. The dispatch describes the dust storms that nearly broke the festival, the Microsoft-staffed Church of Mez camp, John Perry Barlow at Spiral Oasis, and Larry Harvey’s grant-giving organization, showing how Silicon Valley money reshaped an event that began as a beach effigy burning.
A Village Voice article from 1999 on Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork. It covers Grof’s seminar at the New York Open Center, his earlier LSD research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and the claim, seconded by facilitator Oliver Miller, that accelerated breathing reaches the same nonordinary states as psychedelics.
A short first-person sidebar for The Village Voice, 1998, recounting a guided ayahuasca session. Pinchbeck describes green visions of plants and vines, bit-mapped patterns, a sense of the brew scanning his body, and mild vomiting, and concludes that the New Age setting left the experience tantalizing rather than life-changing.
The Village Voice, 1998. The article follows Myron Stolaroff’s New York visit for The Secret Chief, the first book published by MAPS, and a Lindesmith Center talk with psychologist Richard Yensen, tracing how LSD psychotherapy, including alcoholism work under Stanislav Grof in Maryland, was shut down after the 1965 ban.
An essay for The New York Times in 1998. Pinchbeck recounts editing the literary journal Open City with Thomas Beller, from hawking copies on a SoHo street corner to publishing Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, and David Berman, and argues that high rents and media hype have dissolved the conditions that once sustained little magazines.
On the intentional communities movement, centred on Twin Oaks — the commune in Louisa County, Virginia, founded in 1967 on the model of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Written for The New York Times Magazine, August 1997.
Esquire, 1997. A first-person account of five weeks of training at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, where fitness director Erik Stevens and trainers Paul Virtue and Tom Beaumont used stretching, plyometrics, and posture correction to add six inches to Pinchbeck’s vertical leap, enough to touch the rim in Tompkins Square but not to dunk.
On the sons and daughters of the Beat writers, and what it was to grow up as the offspring of a literary counterculture. Written for The New York Times Magazine.
On how digital reproduction was undermining the contemporary art world’s economics — an art market built on scarcity and the unique object confronting a medium in which copies cost nothing and originals do not exist. Written for Wired in December 1994.