Op-Eds/ Essays

October 30, 2023 

Quillette

The Undertow

An immersive look into Trumpworld.
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August 25, 2023

The Critic

Christopher Hitchens’ Legacy

Is he “saving” the left?
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June 30, 2022

The Smart Set

Van Gogh’s travels 

The long hard road of being Van Gogh.
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November 4, 2021

American Purpose

George Packer’s Four Americas

“I am an American. No, I don’t want pity.”
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March 25, 2021

The Smart Set

A New Orleans of One’s Own

Cooped up inside in the land of dreams.
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March 8, 2021

Chicago Review of Books

The story of one of the Chicago 7

.Activism then and now.
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November 6, 2020 

American Purpose

What Shelley Knew About Climate Change 

.The Romantic poet on the melting of Mont Blanc.
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October 26, 2020 

The Smart Set

Canvassing

.Activism on the clipboard beat.
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October 16, 2020 

The Arts Fuse

The Joe Rogan Experience 

The popular podcaster fact-checks way too little.
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July 29, 2020

The Baffler

Onward, Christian Cowboys 

On evangelical white men and toxic masculinity.
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July 6, 2020

The Smart Set

Visiting the Sex Museum & The Louvre

On sex and sexuality in art.
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April 25, 2020

LA Review of Books

Mailer on Nixon in 1972

“There is only one freedom looked for by the Nixon voter– freedom from dread.”
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March 10, 2020

The Baffler

The Loser King

Failing Upward with Oliver North.
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February 28, 2020

The Arts Fuse

The Chicken Sandwich Wars

Political food fight

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February 10, 2020

LA Review of Books

The Unchanging Joe Biden

Joe Biden, then and now.
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December 10, 2019

The Arts Fuse

George Will’s Conservative Sensibility

Will means well, but the people he’s trying to reach are quite happy to be drunk on their own power.
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August 30, 2019

The American Prospect

Charles Manson As A Symbol of…Actually, Not Much

He neither represented the 60’s gone wrong nor brought the decade to an end.
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April 2, 2019

The Guardian

My Dispiriting, Infuriating- and illuminating- Time as a Political Telemarketer

What I learned about politics while phone-banking for the Democrats.
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March 8, 2019

The Baffler

Beggar’s Opera

Reflections on democracy’s decline from years spent in the political fundraising trenches

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April  19, 2018

The Smart Set

Republican Like Who?

Popping Ken Stern’s political bubbles- just because you think you’re getting out of a liberal bubble, doesn’t mean that you’re not still looking out from within one of your own.
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October 30, 2018

The Arts Fuse

Filmstruck’s Untimely Demise and The Death of the Imagination

Why is the curtain suddenly dropping now on FilmStruck, a vast, diverse, and tastefully curated archive of films spanning the past century and the entire globe?
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October 25, 2008

Flak Magazine

Henry Kissinger: The Man With the Plan

Woodward’s new book claims that Kissinger enjoys “a powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy.”

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May 10, 2008

Flak Magazine

The March of the Puppets

Many of the seemingly innocuous talking heads appearing on network news broadcasts both in the build up to the Iraq War and afterwards were in fact Pentagon “message multipliers” or “surrogates” employed to lend credibility to the Administration’s arguments and rationale.

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November 1, 2006

Flak Magazine

Orhan Pamuk’s Temporary Triumph

A poet or novelist is always in a precarious position, socially speaking.