By: Keith A. Spencer and Nicole Karlis

Every summer at the end of August, thousands of people from around the world make their pilgrimage to Burning Man, the signal counterculture festival of our epoch. Some come for a spiritual awakening, some merely to party and indulge, others to gawk at the spectacle. What started as a small summer-solstice gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 has been refashioned as a major event drawing more than 75,000 festival-goers to the Black Rock Desert, a remote plateau desert two hours north of Reno, Nevada.

Describing Burning Man to someone who has never been is an exercise in superlatives. Given its freeform, anarchic nature, it is to some extent what you make of it, and it has a different meaning to different people. Some regard it as the provenance of obnoxious trust-funders and rich techies; others, as the terminus of 1960s-era hippiedom. At a minimum, Burning Man resembles a more libertine Coachella, a giant drug-driven wardrobe malfunction bursting with alternate theories of don’t-tread-on-me hedonism and solipsistic schemes for freer living. Read more...