HARPER’S MAGAZINE (January 22, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Sobriety And Ecstasy’ – Searching for the sublime while staying dry…

High and Dry

Sobriety and transcendence at Bonnaroo by Barrett Swanson

It’s dusk on the first night of Bonnaroo, and the lotus-eaters are all around us. There are candy flippers in white Moon Boots with impressively lacquered eyelashes, and a portly man with a Gandalf beard who’s magnanimously handing out shot glasses. There are hemp-studded undergraduates whose eyes are pinwheeling from whippets, and a cluster of pixie-winged teenagers who are piggishly snorting Percocet….