Profiles, features and interviews in which Daniel Pinchbeck is the subject rather than the author.
An interview in which Pinchbeck argues that relentlessly bleak climate journalism, including New York Magazine’s The Uninhabitable Earth and much of VICE’s reporting, serves corporate culture by breeding fatalism unless it is paired with solutions. He invokes Slavoj Zizek on mindfulness as the ideology of postmodern capitalism, faults Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and calls for full renewable energy within twenty years.
A Rolling Stone interview about ecological crisis and the argument of How Soon Is Now.
Conducted for Codigo, a Mexican art and design magazine, in 2014. Pinchbeck calls for repurposing mass and social media to shift planetary consciousness, citing Jose Arguelles on the sacred function of art, Joseph Beuys on social sculpture, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency, and Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. He mentions his talk show Mind Shift and the film 2012: Time for Change.
A short Q&A for Dazed & Confused, published as the Long Count calendar’s 5,125-year cycle closed in December 2012. Pinchbeck argues that humanity faces a planetary initiation analogous to tribal rites of passage, that climate tipping points make it urgent, and that psychedelics such as ayahuasca and DMT widen consciousness enough to expose modern ideological assumptions.
Stephen Mooallem interviews Pinchbeck for Interview Magazine. The conversation covers his childhood as the son of painter Peter Pinchbeck and Beat memoirist Joyce Johnson, his break from the New York literary world after Robert Bingham’s overdose, and his reading of the Mayan Long Count end date of December 21, 2012 as an initiation rather than an extinction.
An interview conducted by Xerxes Cook for Purple Magazine, Fall/Winter 2012. Pinchbeck describes leaving Open City after Robert Bingham’s death, his iboga and ayahuasca initiations, and his argument that psychedelics surface at moments of civilizational crisis. He reads Albert Hofmann’s 1943 LSD synthesis against the Warsaw Ghetto, and links Jung’s synchronicity to Terence McKenna’s cosmic giggle.
Dwight Garner’s review of Toward 2012, edited with Ken Jordan, for The New York Times.
A 2007 New York Times feature on the 2012 phenomenon that profiles Pinchbeck alongside the late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM and Jose Arguelles’s Harmonic Convergence. It places 2012 millenarianism in a longer American lineage of failed end dates, from William Miller’s Great Disappointment to Y2K, quoting historian Paul S. Boyer on the appeal of apocalypse.
Anu Bonobo’s email interview for Fifth Estate, October 2007. Pinchbeck rejects the New Age label, calling belief the enemy of knowledge, and presents 2012 as a hypothesis rather than a prediction: that the Classic Maya were wizard scientists who calculated a shift in World Ages. He calls for permaculture, local currencies, and a spiritual revolution renewing Emerson’s Transcendentalism.
Rolling Stone’s 2006 profile of Pinchbeck as the figurehead of a new psychedelic elite. It follows him through DMT sessions in an East Village apartment, weekends with Sting and Moby, and Burning Man, and sets his account of ayahuasca against William Burroughs’s, while noting Alex Grey and the Johns Hopkins psilocybin study.