Writer and journalist covering arts, culture, books, and the odd bit of how-to. My book, POE FOR YOUR PROBLEMS, is out now: http://amzn.to/3y7XxYi Signed copies: http://bit.ly/2Xy9p9p
Writing From the Brink
Few creative careers that have risen to such heights have also been conducted under so much stress— financial stress, professional stress, familial stress, psychosexual stress—and it shows in his work.
The Business of Being Edgar Allan Poe
Poe is remembered as the inventor of the horror genre, thanks to Halloween-friendly poems and stories like “The Raven” and “The Tell-tale Heart.” But his creative work can be seen as another kind of business enterprise, charting his valiant but often futile attempts to “coin one’s brain into silver.” This makes him an instructive example today, when new technologies mean that creators face some of the very same problems that they did in the 19th century, including an oversupplied market and the proliferation of free content.
How to Deal with Rejection (and Get Revenge) Like Edgar Allan Poe
Doubling down on your ambitions is the best way to get revenge, and no one ever knew this better than Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe is The Perfect Literary Self-Help Hero For Our Uncertain Times
If you’ve read any self-help before, then you know that most of it reads like a 90-percent redacted NSA document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—all the most salient details blacked out, unavailable. Exactly how many nannies, for instance, did it take for Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In? If the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is such a financial genius, how come he shills real-estate seminars? And if Rachel Hollis really knows how to have a successful, sexy marriage, why’d she get div...
Poe’s ‘Eureka’ Is a Galaxy-Brained Space Opera for Our Times
Edgar Allan Poe articulated the Big Bang theory some 75 years before scientists advanced the idea. At least, that’s become the conventional wisdom.
Was Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe Story?
I’d like to float a fresh theory about Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story “William Wilson,” which I think casts light on Jordan Peele's new movie Us, too.
Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis
If people know Kingsley Amis’s work, they tend to know his name-making first novel, 1954’s Lucky Jim, or perhaps The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. It’s a shame, because Take a Girl Like You is among his best—a great work of art, deeply moral and wonderfully realized. A lost classic.
Failure to launch: Why so many American millennials feel adulthood is a lie
“My mom had five kids by the time she was my age. My dad was starting his second career. And I’m still punching in my parents’ landline at CVS to get the discount.”
Confessions of a TV Tourist
Pam Beesly broke my heart. It wasn’t so much that she married someone else—namely Dunder Mifflin paper salesman Jim Halpert. It was that she first dropped out of art school in New York, schlepped back home to Scranton, and then got married.
How Gaby Dunn found that being 'Bad with Money' can be good for your career
Gaby Dunn can't listen to her own podcast — at least not the early episodes. "I'm really embarrassed about things that I said," she admits, particularly the details she revealed about her bank balance and conversations she'd had with her student-loan servicer. But that's exactly what makes "Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn" so fresh.
Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer
For his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation.
How Tim Heidecker Beat Nate Silver to Predict Donald Trump
On November 9, millions of people woke up to a nightmare. But Tim Heidecker, who writes and stars in Adult Swim’s Decker, found himself in an eerily, uncannily prescient position.
Millennials are obsessed with side hustles because they're all we've ...
What happens when a generation raised with a “you can be whatever you want to be” ethos meets the worst job market in years?
The good news about failing at absolutely everything in your 20s
A couple nights ago, I stumbled across a cache of rejection letters – possibly one of the largest deposits of rejection letters recorded in human history. They were all addressed to me.
Forget SNL: ‘Decker’ is the Best Satire of the Trump Era
This low-budget stoner-y Adult Swim show is a masterpiece, a great work of art.