writer / editor / journalist
On Monday, January, 20, I’m happy to announce I’ll be part of a group of local writers reading at the latest, “Writer’s Resist” event, to be held at Reno, Nevada’s Coffee N’ Comics on Monday, January 20 from 6-8 PM.
I’ll be reading a short piece on the uncanny similarities between our current times and the bonkers 1920 administration of President Warren G. Harding. Hope to see y’all there.
Two years ago, I wrote The Last Jedi had a ‘snark problem,’ a critique that resonated with more than 10k readers and was featured as an audio story (!).
Well, this time The Rise of Skywalker has a ‘story problem’—a cavalier attitude toward storytelling that renders the movie into a series of cheap workarounds which discount the intelligence of its audience and bely its creators’ indifference to their own work, showcasing a greater problem in popular entertainment more generally.
Read my latest Star Wars review on Medium (spoiler alert). Thanks for reading!
I’m thrilled to announced my short story, “Falling,” will be published this spring in Tales from the Deep, an anthology of fantasy, horror and science fiction.
The anthology will be the product of Flying Ketchup Press, a small press based in Kansas City, MO, and be published sometime after May 2020.
“Falling” is a gothic horror retelling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House for the Kaufmann family in Pennsylvania.
In the story, retail scion Edward Zeliger Jr. (a fictional representation of E. J. Kaufmann Jr.) becomes fascinated with a mysterious architect (a portrayal of Wright), who Edward Jr.’s father has hired to build their family’s country house. But The Architect’s sublime (and perhaps supernatural) work strives to achieve harmony with nature, a process which has devastating effects on the Zeliger family—and leads Edward Jr. along the dark path constructed by the master builder.
In July 2019, Fallingwater was proclaimed a World Heritage Site. So it is fitting that, a year later, this short story—an appreciation yet cautionary tale about Wright’s work—will reach the wider world. Thanks to all the beta readers who helped shape it!
Fallingwater. Photo by Harrison Blackman, August 2018.
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019, former vice president Joe Biden visited Reno and immediately set about addressing Trump’s false claims in the wake of the rapidly mushrooming Ukraine scandal. Read my essay in Medium, the fourth post in my Reno Election 2020 politics series.
As the battle for Nevada’s Democratic caucus votes ramp up, so will my political reporting. Yesterday, Pete Buttigieg captivated a Sparks audience before a power outage curtailed the mayor’s appearance. Read about what I thought of Pete in my third post observing the Reno campaign trail.
Alexander “Ha Ha” Phillips was no ordinary mineralogy professor. He was also Princeton’s Republican mayor—and may or may not have banned students from going to the movies.
Thrilled to publish this little piece of quirky history in Princeton Alumni Weekly, part of years of research I’ve conducted on the history of Princeton geology. Read the article here.
Art created for PAW by Daniel Hertzberg, based on a painting by Robert Bruce Horsfall (American, 1869–1948), housed in Princeton University Art Museum.
On Friday the 13th, a day after the third 2019 Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders visited UNR, a campus with a checkered history of white nationalist activity.
You can read my take on the proceedings, the second in my series of creative nonfiction blog posts on presidential candidates visiting Reno, on Medium.
Thanks for reading! Follow my Medium profile for more essays on politics, movies, and storytelling.
