RECENT WORK
My most recent work is collected at Pressfolios.
EARLIER WORK
Vinyl Frontier (Fortune Small Business, November 2004)
Laugh Tracker (Fortune Small Business, April 2004)
Three Wheels To Glory (Fortune Small Business, April 2004)
Sweet Things, Small Packages (Fortune Small Business, March 2004)
Death & The Salesman (Fortune Small Business, March 2004)
Plastic Lens (Fortune Small Business, February 2004)
Fat Profits? (Fortune Small Business, February 2004)
Selling Cynicism (Fortune Small Business, December 2003)
Fit to Print (Fortune Small Business, November 2003)
Hasten Down The Wind (Slate, August 26 2003)
Would You Like Fries With That Curly Endive? (Slate, August 1 2003)
Just Take The Money! (Time, June 9 2003)
Booze Blues (Time, May 5 2003)
The Other Beach Boys (Slate, March 7 2003)
Profit in Parody (Time, December 9, 2002)
In My Lifes (American Journalism Review, December 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, November 11 2002)
(Now defunct, sadly. Archives have been taken offline.)
Game Face (Time, October 14 2002)
Investing in Bad Habits (Time, September 23 2002)
Let's Talk Trash (Time, September 16 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, August 28 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, August 21 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, August 14 2002)
Aphrodisiacs on CD (Slate, July 24 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, May 31 2002)
The Spike Report (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, May 30 2002)
Bless This House Show (Slate, May 15 2002)
Listen, Spot (Time, May 13 2002)
Mojave Modern (Time, April 2002)
Why Not Try Wi-Fi? (Time, April 22 2002)
Catalogology (Slate, February 7 2002)
The Trippy World of Juan Garcia Esquivel (Slate, January 24 2002)
Tracking Tricks and Treats (Slate, October 30 2001)
The Overstuffed World of AIP (Slate, October 29 2001)
Music For TV Dinners (Slate, October 2 2001)
American Made columns (American Heritage, 1989-90)
The Secret of Life (The New Yorker, May 1989 -- paywalled)
Small Town (The New Yorker, May 1989 -- paywalled)
2012: THE SILVER ANNIVERSARY OF
"I STAYED UP WITH JERRY"
In September 1987 Newsweek published my piece "I Stayed Up With Jerry," a sleep-deprived real-time account of that year's Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. It was later anthologized in Al Sarrantonio's "Fireside Treasury of New Humor."
This ended up being, by far, the most widely-read and fondly-remembered story I did at Newsweek. It was a kind of demented landmark in my career. So, in honor of the 25th anniversary of its publication, I've decided to post the original, unedited and very long manuscript. (I'm not kidding about the length. The piece was, in draft form, so tremendously lengthy that when I filed it to my editor, Dominique Browning, she called me into her office and said: "I get it. I see. You want me to kill this so you can go sell it to Rolling Stone, right?" She didn't kill it, for which I've always been grateful. She did, however, cut it mercilessly.)
Here it is, for the first time in unexpurgated form. (PDF)
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I'm also cited in the definitions of the words "nexus" and "glitz" and the phrasal verb "haul off" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, an obscure honor of which I am unreasonably proud.