I have fun reporting on the teensiest shifts in the culture — from the disappearance of pumpernickel bagels, to the widespread adoption of orange lights, to the proliferation of balconies so skinny they can’t fit a chair. When I turned 27 I noticed how the culture is obsessed with 27-year-olds, which may be what I’m still best known for, though it’s not as revealing as “Yogurt in their Hand.”
My relatives were artists, collectors, and gallery and museum administrators, and I studied painting, so talking about the business of art and the process of making stuff comes easily. I’ve hung out with John Currin in his studio, profiled the master painter Thomas Woodruff, gabbed with William Wegman about his youthful reno project, and got a dozen artists to open up about the nightmare of working for Tom Sachs, leading Nike to drop its contact with him. At the Times-Picayune, I tracked down a Lynda Benglis sculpture that had been sitting in a sewage plant for 30 years, leading it to be displayed again. An obsession with how we name and categorize colors led to a piece on why Home Depot sells a white paint called “Climate Change.”
Born in LA, my first job was at a movie theater, and I love to peek behind the curtain. For a 2011 Times essay, I spoke to set designers re-imagining New York for a slew of shows and have continued to report on what production design says about real world locations. I reported the definitive story on the real mansion in Anora, speaking with a former occupant; learned about the research that went into Jonathan Glazer’s recreation of a Nazi officer’s house for Zone of Interest; and unpacked why a flashy condo in a Spike Lee adaptation was the perfect modern equivalent for the home that Akira Kurosawa used. When the filmmaker John Wilson opened a movie theater, I broke the news and followed up to see how the business was going for the magazine’s Reasons to Love issue. And when I noticed the director Paul Schrader had moved into an an assisted-living apartment, I saw a way to sneak a profile onto my real estate beat.
Sometimes a simple assignment is an excuse to get stylish — like the time I followed an artist giving a tour of the city’s shadows. (“Beneath your feet, there is a second city. At dawn it grows, it is gone by noon, at dusk it is long and lengthens.”) Or the time I drank every non-Coke beverage at Atlanta’s Museum of Coca-Cola for Lucky Peach. (Sprite Zero is “a cruel governess, a blank stare: the negation of soda.”) Or a series profiling New Orleans’ most smoke-filled bars in the week before a ban on smoking indoors kicked in. (Night 1: “If he pours one, he rests his cigarette in an ashtray. Sometimes the cigarette lives out the rest of its sad, little life in that plastic grave.”)
MORE FOR NEW YORK
I love to cover the social history of spaces, learning about the design choices that went into including the West Village hideout walled floor-to-ceiling in books by poet and translator Richard Howard; the last three Upper East Side co-ops with private restaurants; the townhome that was the epicenter of a only-in-New-York social circle of Gothic furniture collectors; the enclave where Robert Gottlieb and Janet Malcolm shared a yard with Katharine Hepburn and Bob Dylan; and the SoHo loft where a group of feminist writers would meet around a dining room table, which gave me an excuse to call Vivian Gornick.
I like using reporting skills for obscure mysteries — to understand why an oddly designed condo in a prime location has been vacant for more than a decade, and zooming in on every granular listing image to learn who was selling a condo filled with acting trophies. By making a few extra phone calls, I broke news about the backstory of a Staten Island ferry bought at auction by two SNL bros, delved into a dispute between neighbors over noise — even speaking to the alleged killer and their landlord.
ESSAYS + EPHEMERA
Tiny Furniture: I spoke with artists making miniature furniture not for dollhouses, but for collectors, design nerds, and themselves. “It’s like you’re in a dream where everything is out of proportion and shrinking,” one Dutch artist said to me.
Blood makes Noise: I wrote for The Believer about how the pandemic made me more aware of blood in the only piece I wrote in 2020 that feels close to the strange feeling of that year.
The artist who kept a pandemic diary: I profiled the artist Roni Horn, a “granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she grew up trying to understand why other Jews in Russia and Hungary had not scrambled to escape the pogroms. ‘You acclimatize to the wrong climate…I don’t want to acclimatize to the wrong weather, and I’ve known that since I was a child.’”
Empty World: My team at VICE spent the winter of 2019/2020 covering a viral outbreak as if it was a foreign news story. When it crept onto our shore, I was prepared ahead of time to write a eulogy for life as we had known it. This Adam Curtis-esque documentary essay aired on March 12, 2020. Later my team gave me a ring that reads “Cassandra.”
Don’t call him prescient: I wrote about the work of sculptor Tishan Hsu. “Like props built for the Harkonnen den in a ‘Dune’remake, they seem designed to furnish a future we could not want to live in — a dystopia that may reflect aspects of our reality, but remains enigmatic enough to hide its politics, and grotesque enough to make more squeamish viewers turn away before they’ve had a chance.”
Reading the Barr report with erasure poets: I explained erasure and its new relevance to a VICE audience. “Erasure poems tend to show us how much of our world is made up of redaction: how everything we see, touch, read, wear, and nibble was created through selection by cutting, refracting, withholding, reducing, commercializing, and making smaller from a wider, more complex strata of possibilities.”
The archaeology lab assistant decoding Trump-Russia: To understand the psychological effects of the news cycle in the Trump era, consider an ex-heroin addict who spends 30 hours a week summarizing news lines on Trump for an audience of 75,000. I profiled the “Keeper” of Reddit’s “Keep Track” forum. “Sorting through the data of the ancient dead — their pots, their knives, the rocks they cooked on — in order to reconstruct how they lived isn’t so different from tracking the Mueller investigation.”
Mardi Gras for the meme generation: America’s oldest partying tradition, New Orleans Carnival, meets the internet. For Gizmodo, I covered the costume ball of a parading organization inspired by the online aesthetic movement Vaporwave. “Unlike traditional Carnival krewes who toy with aristocracy by plucking debutantes to serve as ‘queens,’ the Krewe of Vaporwave sends up a power structure that does more these days to rule our lives: the power of screens.“
Poets and Programmers: When an Atlanta tech start-up brought in poets to read to their employees, I took a deep dive for LitHub to zoom in on the relationship between poets and corporations, writers and their day jobs, metered verse and marketing lingo. "For Sturm and the poets of his generation, debt feels much more immediate than the idea of a sacrosanct space where poetry lives without interference from corporations…”
Yogurt in Their Hand: I wrote for The Cut about a Page Six typo that I “think about a lot”—a typo that caught Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling “walking together with yogurt in their hand.” I dive into the mystery—were they ever at a 16 Handles?—and what it says about celebrity and the city. “‘Cone or cup?’ I could see some frozen yogurt shop employee asking, in the saddest scene Patti Smith ever envisioned for the East Village.”
Beacon in the night: The ultimate sign of our over-stimulated culture? The documentation of neon. “Neon signs flash and blink and blare. They outline leggy dancers; they scream out “LIQUOR”; they direct you toward a hotdog. Yet in hyper-stimulated New York, even things designed to be noticed go unnoticed…“
The Cultural History of the Tamagotchi Egg: The origin of my generation’s obsession with the handheld screen begins with a Japanese toy. I took a closer look for Motherboard. “If you picked up a dystopian 19th century novel, paged through it, and found the plot-point where the fictional city’s children were scrambling to get to toy stores to buy a robotic egg that was unable to hatch or reproduce, you would put the novel down. It would just be too painfully obvious a symbol…”
Why Don’t We Appreciate Mother? I visited a museum as overlooked as its subject – New York’s “Museum of Motherhood” – to write for The Believer about our weird relationships with Mommy Dearest. “New York is a city of places to run from your mother—including but not limited to strip clubs, racecourses, and a bar called Mother’s Ruin (18 Spring Street)…”
New York Without a Net: If it’s egomaniacal to call this prescient, so be it. In the summer of 2009 I spent a week in New York without a cell phone or the internet to write for The New York Observer about my generation’s then-unique addiction. The challenge: to live as one would have in the year of my birth. Harder than it looks.
Leech, Meet Patient: I can’t prove it - but this may be the inspiration for a plotline on “30 Rock” where Jenna’s fame convinces her to follow a leech facial. I did the same—only, as a gonzo cub reporter—as I suffered through a modern day leeching for The New York Times. The only time I’ve ever literally bled to file.
The Night We Sneaked Into the Center of the World: Another essay for The Awl – this one on China, the Olympics, and the borderland between spectacle and loneliness as embodied by finding oneself in a stadium after dark “feeling like marbles that had been dropped in a funnel and had rolled, powerlessly, toward what had drawn us in.”
PR for the PRC: Working for China’s Ministry of Propaganda was my entrance to the news biz. I wrote about the flavor of censorship for N+1.
LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS
The afterlife of Clay Shaw: On the only man ever indicted for JFK’s assassination, and what it did to him, written for A1 of The Times-Picayune’s assassination package. The story Oliver Stone ignored. And the 2nd place winner of the 2014 Louisiana/Mississippi Associated Press Media Editors (APME).
In the seven nights before New Orleans’ smoking ban kicked in, I visited seven bars for The Times-Picayune to document the end of a scene, and to describe a timeless tradition: a beer and a cigarette, imbibed simultaneously from atop a bar stool. Night 1, Night 2, Night 3, Night 4, Night 5, Night 6,Night 7. This series sparked on social media and generated a typoon of feedback from divided readers.
Who is that recluse in the ranch house, the one with the billion-dollar inheritance? That time I went to Texas for The Times-Picayune to learn everything I could about the secretive woman who was set to inherit the Saints team. This required a bit of sports, a bit of business, a bit of probing through municipal files – and a bit of old-fashioned sleuthing. Spoiler alert: I found her.
The Guardian of Death in the City of Death: Profiling a man who served in public office for 40 years – and who survived through regular scandals – is harder than it looks. Herein, I profile New Orleans’ longest-serving and most eccentric Coroner, famed locally for playing the trumpet in his white suit and alligator boots. The piece swings from nuns to meth addicts, from racial strife to police murders, as quickly as life swings in this city. Editors note: I pulled this off with a 48-hour deadline.
Nearly a decade after Hurricane Katrina hit the Lower 9th Ward: A legacy of loud, media-driven change and the lasting silence of high weeds and torn-up houses. The story ran on A1 for the storm’s 9th anniversary. “She sat inside her home while a block away, a group of teenage girls stood at the levee wall, shifting their weight from foot to foot and listening to a guide talk long.’They take pictures of the wall like it’s the Great Wall of China,’ Parker said. ‘Leave us alone, already.’”
How the unsolved murder of one woman, 50 years ago, still haunts New Orleans: Mary Sherman’s murder has been pored over by JFK assassination buffs. But they never had the police file… until now. And yes, if you’re asking – I’m still getting e-mails from curious conspiracy theorists over this piece.
A Church Reopens after Katrina: “It was a discordant odor, lingering from parties held in the hall on the preceding Saturday evenings, with their bows and bunting and boozy joy.“
50 years after plane crash left no survivors, a legacy still remains: How local legend swirled around a plane that crashed under mud in Lake Pontchartrain, to be never fully recovered. This was a one-day story, which is 50-percent of the reason why I’m still proud of it.
Comedian, consigliere, politician: My intimate profile of a beloved, small-town mayor – and everything about Louisiana politics that his career has embodied.
LIFE IN ATLANTA
A dead mall on its busiest day: I talked to shoppers, workers, and wanderers at one mall on one day to paint a portrait of the decline of American malls for The New York Times that featured my photos. “In wingtip shoes and a fedora, James Eldridge unfolded The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and proceeded to read it, back to front…”
Welcome to Creflo Dollar Highway: I walked the length of a storied road talking to nearly everyone I passed for Creative Loafing. ”Ride this route and see a slice of American weirdness, American ingenuity, and American poverty, bookended by two Waffle Houses.”
Your futile, last chance: A first-person essay on taking a police department course on how to survive a mass shooting. “We had tried to keep positive and take notes while we watched videos with audio of women screaming and read bar graphs that showed the ‘percentage of the dead’…”
The shooting of an unarmed veteran: I painted moments in a protest scene for Creative Loafing. “Bishop, who is 63 and served in the war in Vietnam, still walks like a soldier — shoulders back, head up. But when he saw Bridget Anderson, he slouched and his eyes began to water…”
MISC. PROFILES
The Pastel Dream of the DeveloperThe Washington Post
A Real Life Comic-Book SuperheroNewsweek
Liu Bolin at the World Trade CenterThe New York Times
Eva, Queen of the RussiansThe New York Times
That’s Mark Jenkins All OverThe Washington Post
Wells Tower, Neighborhood Dude The Greenpoint Gazette
A Busy Day for Nuptials Across New York StateThe New York Times
The Ultimate Clock WatcherThe New York Times
The Man Who Would Love RocksThe New York Times
SCENES + THE SILLY
Photo Essay: At the Beach, Vulnerability and ConfidenceThe New York Times
Fun and the Games The Washington Post
A Sense of Euphoria Settles over the West VillageThe New York Times
Live-blogging a BoatThe New York Times
How to Write a Joke in ChinaTime Magazine
The Bearded Among UsThe Greenpoint Gazette
Building a Model New York, Only to Torch It The New York Times
St. Patrick in the Middle Kingdom Time Magazine
Bjork, in ChinaPaste Magazine
As Goes DeNiro… The New York Observer
Flaubert’s Parrots The New York Observer
11 Can Cans in 10 Hours, That’s Bastille! The New York Times
Video: The Night Same-Sex Marriage PassedThe New York Times
CULTURE CLASHES
Greenpoint, meet Dominique Strauss KahnThe New York Times
With New City T-Shirts, City Shoots for the HipThe New York Times
Scrawling on the Cubicle WallsThe New York Times
The Death of H&H The New York Times
Selling Pieces of Brooklyn, But Not the BridgeThe New York Times
Hong Kong’s T-Shirts and TriadsTime Magazine
The Expat Factor: Voting Abroad The New Republic
What I Imagine Tim Gunn Thinks of the Manuscript I’m Currently Writing The Hairpin