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.
Published in The Village Voice in 1998 under the title Culture Shocker. The article text is not present in this archive entry, which points readers to a PDF scan of the original.
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.
Originally published in the Forward in 1997. A profile of Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg on the American release of Blue Mondays by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, covering his years as a high school dropout, the bankruptcy of his Kasimir Press, and his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. Grunberg, then 25 and living in New York, discusses the novel’s bestseller status in Holland.
Published in The Village Voice, 1996, and filed under reviews. The archived entry holds only a link to a PDF scan; no article text is reproduced here.
Originally published in The Washington Post, 1996. A review of Leslie Fiedler’s essay collection The Tyranny of the Normal, which ranges across organ transplants, sideshow freaks, and the religious core of the 1960s counterculture. Pinchbeck argues that Fiedler abandons critical rigor for personal performance, and that his claims about the popular mind overstep what his kind of criticism can support.