The Tyranny of the Tinkerer

I recently published, in The Nation’s culture section online, an essay on Tom Wolfe’s 1969 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—his portrait of Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and the birth of the psychedelic movement. This piece came out of a re-engagement with Tom Wolfe’s work last fall, when I moderated a panel on a new batch of reissues of Wolfe’s early nonfiction. Between that and a previous study (which resulted in this New Statesman piece in 2023), I’ve now read most of Wolfe’s output—and Electric Kool-Aid, I’m convinced, is both his best book and his most unusual, for reasons that I describe in the piece.