Harper's recently published an extensive piece on William Powell, who, as a teen trying to avoid Vietnam in the early 1970s, wrote a guide to making bombs and drugs.
Powell has been trying for decades to take The Anarchist Cookbook out of print, including in December 2013 when news media reported that Arapahoe High School shooter Karl Pierson had read the book.
After the shooting at Arapahoe High School, Powell wrote a piece for the Guardian to call again for the book to go out of print. “I suspect that the perpetrators of these attacks did not feel much of a sense of belonging, and the Cookbook may have added to their sense of isolation,” he wrote. “I do not know the influence the book may have had on the thinking of the perpetrators of these attacks, but I cannot image that it was positive.”
