This Is Burning Man

An inside look at the event known only as Burning Man.

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For those who’ve never heard of Burning Man, it can be hard to explain.
It sometimes calls itself an arts festival or an experiment in “radical self-reliance and
radical self-expression.” Picture a temporary city, built every August in Nevada’s
barren Black Rock Desert, where as many as 30,000 gather to set up shimmering temples, gardens of
flame-shooting lotus flowers, three-story chandeliers that appear to have fallen from the sky,
and other marvels they’ve spent countless hours constructing—for no glory other than
the pleasure of their fellow “burners.” The blissed-out festival, which operates
on a no-barter, no-trade “gift economy,” concludes with the ritual conflagration
of a 40-foot statue: the Burning Man.

Doherty traces the
evolution of what is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise from the first bonfire gathering at
San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986. “It grew spontaneously and… accidentally,”
he writes, “evolving into something that has become the measure of thousands of people’s
lives.”

A nine-year veteran of the burn, Doherty comes dangerously close to saying
that the event’s glory days—which he, of course, experienced—are now behind
it. An editor of the libertarian Reason magazine, he has little patience for festival director
Larry Harvey’s new, more political stance against rampant consumerism, and the ideas and
experiences of ravers, progressives, and women—all arguably part of Burning Man’s
core demographic—are, for the most part, sidelined here. But his book is an intelligent and
exhaustive effort to chronicle the explosion of one of America’s most implausible subcultures.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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