S E L E C T E D W O R K
A Book Is a Book (Except When It’s an E-book) The Nation
Corporations won the first battle in their war on libraries—or did they?
Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court The Nation
On the megapublishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive
STAT: the vexed question of “proof” in clinical research Longreads
Medicine, placebos, and certainty
ChatGPT Can’t Think, But It Can Lie The Nation
Doesn’t get jokes and lies like a rug
BuzzFeed’s Epic Fail Is Bad News The Nation
Media magnates don’t like assets they cannot fully control
The Center Held Just Fine Popula
Joan Didion, first lady of neoliberalism
Pumping Ryan Popula
A surprising chat with the photographer who took the infamous Paul Ryan gym photos
You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real Popula
(It’s not real.)
MSNBC Public Editor column Columbia Journalism Review
News and the Man
Bourdain Confidential Popula
A long afternoon at a bar with Anthony Bourdain
Mastodon is Fun Popula
Time to leave Twitter (especially for journalists)
The Bitcoin Boom The New Yorker
Pub. April 1, 2013, when one BTC cost like $100
Yes, Crypto Is Crashing Again. Blockchain Will Survive New York Times
Nine years later, a sad reboot of the story of the internet
Inside David Foster Wallace’s Self-Help Library The Awl
Things I learned about Wallace from his collected papers at the Ransom Center
It’s Adventure Time Popula (originally at The Awl)
At Cartoon Network with the makers of Adventure Time
Art, Commerce and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony Longreads
Friendship is complicated
The Chekhov-Saunders Humanity Kit Longreads (available on Wayback Machine only)
I took an MFA class at Syracuse with George Saunders, and so can you
Coloring Outside the Lines: Racecraft and Inequality in American Life Los Angeles Review of Books
The best book about race relations I’ve ever read
The incalculable Popula
On my mom’s death, the day of the Capitol insurrection
Harry Potter and the Incredibly Conservative Aristocratic Children’s Club The Awl
J.K. Rowling’s true colors were glaring, even back then
How the Las Vegas Review-Journal Unmasked Its Owners The New Yorker
Sheldon Adelson failed to keep the secret of the newsroom’s ownership from its own reporters
Letter of Recommendation: The Oxford English Dictionary New York Times Magazine
A R C H I V I N G
L I B R A R Y R I G H T S
D I G I T A L O W N E R S H I P
In a time of increasing attacks on press and academic freedom, my current work is focused largely on digital ownership and library rights, both as a writer and as a member of the Brick House Cooperative.
A Book Is a Book (Except When It’s an E-book) The Nation
Archiving official documents as an act of radical journalism Columbia Journalism Review
Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court The Nation
Access to Journalism Is a Human Right The Nation
Erasing History Columbia Journalism Review
Billion-Dollar Book Companies Are Ripping Off Public Schools The New Republic
Amazon’s Endangered Species: World Culture Popula
Sell This Book! The Nation
What Kind of Writer Accuses Libraries of Stealing? Popula
Buy Paper Books Popula
You Can't Buy These Books The Nation
P O L I T I C S
G O V E R N M E N T
T H E L A W
Our Billionaire Philanthropists The Awl
What It’s Like to Get a National Security Letter: A Talk with Brewster Kahle The New Yorker
Sumnerdämmerung The New Yorker
ICYMI: Republicans Heart Putin Popula
The Secret of Politics is Death! Popula
Two Thousand Eight Popula
The Failures of Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged and Our Tanked Economy Popula
The Democrats just ceded economic justice to Donald Trump The Los Angeles Times
Fill In the Gap Harper’s
What is Shari'a Law? The Awl
Inequality in California Capital and Main
An exchange with VP Marketing and Communications of the SV Community Foundation Pacific Standard
Coloring Outside the Lines: Racecraft and Inequality in American Life The Los Angeles Review of Books
Driving the Five Aeon
Los Angeles, April 29 – May 4, 1992 The Awl
Our Reflection in the N.S.A.’s Prism The New Yorker
J O U R N A L I S M
BuzzFeed’s Epic Fail Is Bad News The Nation
Archiving official documents as an act of radical journalism Columbia Journalism Review
The Harper’s Letter: Please, Seriously? (with David Roth) Popula
MSNBC Public Editor column Columbia Journalism Review
Don’t Save Journalism Popula
Service Journalism: Josh Barro Stands Up for Newsroom Bosses Popula
The Kyiv Post’s Brian Bonner on Why Silence is Not Golden Columbia Journalism Review
Dismediation, revisited Popula
How the Las Vegas Review-Journal Unmasked Its Owners The New Yorker
From Goldenballs to Gawker Columbia, a Journal of Literature and Art
Post-truth and the press Columbia Journalism Review
Why Gawker, and gossip, are good The Los Angeles Times
How Much Did We Need This Blasphemy? On the Charlie Hebdo Assassinations Gawker
Mastodon is Idiot-Proofed at the Top Popula
Mastodon is Fun Popula
Toots Sweet Popula
Predictions for Nieman Lab:
2017: “It’s true, I saw it on Facebook”
2016: News Isn’t for the Billionaire Few
2015: A Return to Subscriptions
2014: News as a Dynamic, Living Conversation
S C I E N C E
T E C H N O L O G Y
T H E I N T E R N E T
ChatGPT Can’t Think, But It Can Lie The Nation
The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg Medium
Pascal’s Climate Popula
Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert The Awl
Free Speech for Whom? Give You One Guess The Daily Beast
Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty The New Yorker
STAT: the vexed question of “proof” in clinical research Longreads
Was Aaron Swartz Stealing? The Awl
STEM vs. The Humanities, 1959 Edition Popula
The Carousel of Progress Popula
U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, and the Failure of Invective The Awl
The Next Google: It’s Like Google, But For Search The Awl
Marc Andreessen and the Inevitability of Catastrophic Ideas The Awl
Little Brother Is Watching You The New Yorker
How High-def is Changing Your Brain, and Driving the Prop Master Crazy Bloomberg
How Video Game Deaths Help Us Live Kotaku
Please Kill Me (Eventually) VICE Motherboard
When Every Crazy Person On The Internet Is Mad At You BuzzFeed
Not Fade Away: on living, dying and the digital afterlife The Verge
B L O C K C H A I N
C R Y P T O C U R R E N C Y
You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real Popula
Yes, Crypto Is Crashing Again. Blockchain Will Survive New York Times
Zuck Bucks Suxxxxx Hmm Daily
The Bitcoin Boom The New Yorker
Web3 Is a Return to the Internet’s Wild Spirit Coindesk
The Great VC Coin Rush: At The Bitcoin Convention The Awl
Craig Wright, Bitcoin’s Latest “Inventor” The New Yorker
Reddit’s Satoshi Nakamoto Skeptics The New Yorker
The Future of Bitcoin The New Yorker
What Does Bloomberg’s ‘Crypto Story’ Mean for Crypto? Popula
Civil-Backed News Site Stores Full Article on Ethereum Blockchain Coindesk
Decentralized Journalism: A conversation with Maria Bustillos Postlight
Bringing the Blockchain to Journalism Cointalk with Jay Kang and Aaron Lammer
Boom Times a blog at Popula
B U S I N E S S
Wells Fargo: The Robber Bank Slate
Place Your Bets: Oh Wait, You Can’t Buzzfeed
The Problem with the Financial Services Elite The Billfold
Friendship is Complicated: Art, Commerce and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony Longreads
Peter Thiel’s Familiar Villainy New York Magazine
The Poverty of Jeff Bezos Popula
Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College The Awl
The Vicious Trademark Battle Over ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ The Awl
O N T H E L A T E
A N T H O N Y B O U R D A I N
Bourdain was a magnificent Twitterer. I was very lucky to have gotten to hang out with him, just the one time.
Bourdain Confidential Popula
Fiction Confidential Eater
Bourdain’s novels are most revealing.
‘Roadrunner’ and the dismal search for the ‘Real Bourdain’ Eater
A slick hagiography.
Who Knows Anthony Bourdain? Eater
A review of Bourdain: The Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever
A podcast with Manoush Zomorodi, featuring excerpts from original interview tape
Dozens of Bourdain’s friends and associates contributed to the audiobook of Laurie Woolever’s kaleidoscopic collage, Bourdain: The Oral Biography, each of us reading our own parts
B O O K S
Myriam Gurba Is Not an AI Popula
This Brand Could Be Your Life: David Shapiro’s Supremacist The New Yorker
We and Orwell Popula
Don’t Blame American Dirt Popula
The Artist is the Art Popula
Marshall McLuhan, Superstar Nieman Lab
The Poetry of Ally Sheedy: A Look Back The Awl
Jessica Crispin’s Why I Am Not a Feminist The Los Angeles Review of Books
The Faulkner Truthers The Awl
What George Orwell, Henry Miller and John Waters Taught Me About What To Read Next The New Yorker
By Anonymous: Can a Writer Escape Vulnerability? The New Yorker
Robert Hughes: 1938 - 2012 The Awl
Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing The Awl
Jonathan Franzen, Come Join Us! The New Yorker
Love, a Cad, a City: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. The Awl
Reading Writers I Can’t Stand The New Yorker
Abnegation (on Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours) The Los Angeles Review of Books
The Great, Forgotten Sci-Fi Novel About The End Of The World (with David Roth) The Awl
Psychotic jest and infinite reactions: How David Foster Wallace didn’t invent the Internet’s voice Nieman Lab
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, by David Lipsky The Awl
The Chekhov-Saunders Humanity Kit Longreads
Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library The Awl
Letter of Recommendation: The Oxford English Dictionary New York Times Magazine
Rising Together: A Corrective to Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men The Los Angeles Review of Books
How Staying Small Helps New Directions Publish Great Books The New Yorker
Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun The Awl
Curses! The birth of the bleep and modern American censorship The Verge
F I L M
T E L E V I S I O N
The Menu
Don’t Look Up
Booksmart
Barb and Star /The Devil Wears Prada
Blade Runner 2049
Inception
The End Of The Tour
Mad Max: Fury Road
Going Clear
The Hollywood Life of Walter Mitty
The Look of Silence
The Artist
“You need to calm down”
Sex and The City II
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Eat, Pray, Love / Life During Wartime
The Master (with David Roth)
A Dangerous Method (with David Roth)
To the Wonder (with David Roth)
Bee and PuppyCat
My Little Pony
Avatar
C U L T U R E ( M I S C . )
Views of the World from 9th Avenue Popula
Stars and Sceptres Aeon
On Speaking Spanish: A Conversation with Myriam Gurba Popula
The Empire of Harmlessness: Hello Kitty at 40 Gawker
Luxury Interiors Popula
Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple The Awl
This Brand Could Be Your Life: David Shapiro’s Supremacist The New Yorker
The first dish ever cooked on television: remembering Marcel Boulestin Eater
Soul Food: Cookbooks as Literature The Awl
Our Week With Marilyn (with David Roth) The Awl
Ruling Class Superfriends Popula
I N T E R V I E W S
Brewster Kahle
Ashley Feinberg
Frank Rich
Phil Donahue
Anthony Bourdain
Richie Nakano
Jia Tolentino and Diana Moskovitz
Astra Taylor
Teju Cole
Kaiser Kuo
Wilfred Chan
José Andrés
Faiz Shakir
George Saunders (I)
George Saunders (II)
Barbara Epler
rms
David Lipsky
Tom Bissell
Hamilton Nolan
Carol Channing and Justin Vivian Bond
David Lowery
Tracy Fullerton
Jackie Collins
EJ Johnson
E S S A Y S
Pipo, pelota and the lessons of a long-ago life ESPN
The Black Void of the Moon The Awl
Trinity The Awl
The Question The Awl
The Man is Everywhere: I Was a Disneyland Grad Night Chaperone The Awl
F I C T I O N
Lot 51 The Paris Review
H U M O R
OMG Jeff Bezos Has Asked Me to Be His Accountant! Popula
What Is On the Bookshelves at Puck? Popula
On Discovering That the Kids Have Drunk Nearly All the Scotch The Awl
The Los Angeles Review of Cups Los Angeles Review of Books
Behold a Pale Little Pony: Watching the RNC Los Angeles Review of Books
Hope is the Thing With Feathers excerpted from the book, Cat is Art Spelled Wrong
Annals of Smart People Throughout History Popula
B O N U S
135 pieces for The Awl, 2009-2015
P A N E L S
P O D C A S T S
E T C .
Publisher Lawsuit Against Internet Archive Puts the Future of Book Ownership in Question WDET
Decentralized Journalism Postlight
Major Publishers Want to Shut Down Digital Lending Tech Won’t Save Us, with Paris Marx
In conversation with Brewster Kahle New York Society Library
Post-truth and the press Columbia Journalism Review
Bleep! with Chris Berube 99% Invisible
Building an Unbreakable Media Company Everything I’ve Learned, with Mark Armstrong
Politics and the Media TNR Live
Web3 and Metaverse Impacts on Journalism with Emily Bell, ISOJ 2022 Austin
Bringing the Blockchain to Journalism Cointalk, with Jay Kang and Aaron Lammer
On lifestyle modifications that help MS patients–and how the medical establishment resists them, with Madeleine Brand on KCRW’s Press Play
Apocalypse Now?, with Christopher Lydon, Nicholson Baker and Mark O'Connell, on WBUR’s Open Source
(and a lovely YouTube promo for the above show)
DFW, FTW: Life In the Internet Age, in conversation with Christopher Lydon and Paul Ford on WBUR’s Open Source
KCRW’s The Mixer with Steve Chiotakis: The Haves and the Have Nots
Fates and Furies vs. Bats of the Republic: Verdict as Judge, 2016 Morning News Tournament of Books
On Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men with Warren Olney on To the Point
With Nicole Sandler on inequality in California, for Capital and Main
With Colin McEnroe and Evan Hughes on WNPN, in conversation about David Foster Wallace
Racecraft: in conversation with Colin Marshall, Ander Monson and Cord Jefferson, for LA Review of Books
(did you seriously make it all the way down here?! wow my grateful thanks for reading.)