My Writing, Elsewhere

Here You’ll Find Links to a Selection of Freelance Projects and Pieces

Podcasting

My current podcast is called Charm Offensive. It resurrects the lost art of the phone call to explore male friendship. Or maybe it’s jsut a thing Dan Kois and I do for fun. Either way, you can listen to it here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Previously, I co-hosted the podcast Working for Slate, a podcast about the creative process. Over the course of four years, my co-hosts and I interviewed chefs, directors, writers, actors, editors, composers, make up artists, a parfumer and more. The full archive can be found here. Here are some of my favorite episodes of mine:
Writer-Director Phil Alden Robinson on the making of Sneakers
The New Zealand power pop band The Beths on how they make their albums and prepare for concerts
Ali Slagle on how to write a recipe, and her work for both The New York Times and her own cookbooks
Clarinetist Anthony McGill on where creativity lives within the very strict parameters of classical music
Arian Moayed on how he built his career, and the joy of playing unlikeable characters like Stewy on Succession
The Adams Brothers on the making of Dwarf Fortress, one of the most complex and influential video games of all time

Before that, I created, wrote, and hosted a limiter series podcast on Shakespeare and politics for Slate called Lend Me Your Ears. Based on interviews with experts and artists, and original performances of chunks of the plays, the show explores the politics of Shakespeare’s day in order to shed new light on both his plays and our own time. No need to have read the plays to dig it. We provide approachable summaries in every episode. You can find the whole shebang here.

Writing About Shakespeare

Speaking of Shakespeare, I write quite a bit about him. No artist has brought more joy or profundity to my life. The great thing about Shakespeare is that, because there is an infinite amount to learn and discover about his work, and world, and influence, anyone encountering his plays has the same amount to learn. I’m a firm believer in democratizing Shakespeare, who wrote for the mob as well as the nobility, and whose work is all of our inheritance. So here are some Shakespeare pieces I’ve written.

• Is Hamlet Fat?: A Slate Investigation looks at the history of Hamlet interpretation to ask whether we’ve been getting the character wrong the whole time.
• The Throne Room Where It Happens compares Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One and Alexander Hamilton in, uh, Hamilton to explore how we consider ambition, cynicism and idealism in our leaders. It had the sad misfortune to be published the day before the 2016 Presidential election. Whoops!
• Shakespeare was Shakespeare reviews the book Shakespeare Was a Woman in order to debunk the various conspiracy theories surrounding Shakespeare’s work and urge us to stop giving oxygen to the arguments that Shakespeare didn’t write his work.
• For Slate, I’ve written about three different movies that reimagine Shakespeare’s life and work. The first is Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True, a movie about the final years of Shakespeare’s life. The second is The King, a rewrite of Henry IV, Part One with Timothée Chalamet as Prince Hal and Joel Edgerton as Falstaff. The third is about Hamnet (the film, not the book) and it’s treatment of the play Hamlet.
• For The Atlantic, I looked at two books about the artists and entrepreneurs of Shakespeare’s early career, and how we just can’t quit romantic-era myths of the literary genius.

Writing About Acting

I’ve written numerous pieces about actors (and there’s several interviews of them to be found in the archives of Working). While the interest in actors and acting predated writing The Method, the oppotrunity to write about actors really took off after. Here are some selections of my writing about actors and acting:

• I profiled Nathan Lane for New York Magazine
• I interviewed Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting coach to learn about his process while writing about The Savages, one of his greatest performances, for The Current
• Why are acting ensembles so pleasurable? I have some thoughts here.
• I interviewed Ellen Burstyn, the great keeper of the flame of Method acting, about what the Method is (and isn’t) and how she uses it.
• Nicolas Cage may be the last great acting pioneer. I dove into his life and work to explain what makes him so special for The New Yorker.
• Speaking of weirdos, I also wrote about Tom Hardy for Slate. I’ve done a bunch of assessments for them, including of Colin Farrell, Guy Pearce, and Daniel Day-Lewis
• I made the case for ungendered acting awards in The New York Times here

Other Writing

A grab bag of stuff I’m proud of for your reading enjoyment.

• I wrote about the life of Johnny Carson for The New Yorker.
• I argued for a federal bailout of the American Theater for The New York Times
• I reviewed the first comprehensive biography of August Wilson for The Wall Street Journal.
• I wrote about Michael Moorcock, the most secretely-influential figure of 20th century arts and letters, for The Washington Post
• For Slate, I dug into the backstory of lost sci-fi author John M. Ford. A surprising and gfratifying result of this piece was Ford’s work finally being brought back into print by the good people of Tor.
• Also for Slate, I told the story of the radical experimental art collective that… designed sets and props for Melrose Place? No matter what you think, the story is weirder than that.