Daniel Pinchbeck
American author and journalist
Daniel Pinchbeck (born June 15, 1966) is an American author and journalist. His books include Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, the New York Times best seller 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Notes from the Edge Times, How Soon is Now, and When Plants Dream. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Art Forum, The Village Voice, and Esquire. He is a co-founder of the web magazine Reality Sandwich and of the website Evolver.net, and he edited the North Atlantic Books publishing imprint Evolver Editions. He was featured in the 2010 documentary 2012: Time for Change, directed by Joao Amorim and produced by Mangusta Films. He is the founder of the think tank Center for Planetary Culture, which produced the Regenerative Society Wiki.
Family and background
Pinchbeck's father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter, and his mother, writer and editor Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation who dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road at the time was published in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson's book, Minor Characters).
Pinchbeck calls himself an "utterly nonreligious Jew."
Works and activities
Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 1994 he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of "Thirty Under Thirty" destined to change our culture through his work with Open City.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Daniel Pinchbeck” as american author and journalist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american author and journalist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q382460. VIAF identifies the subject as 55340738. The Library of Congress control number is no2002099669. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 2012, 2010 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Daniel Pinchbeck” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.