LA RB Film Editor Annie Berke and I spoke with Caleb Zakarin, Assistant Editor of the New Books Network on their podcast and an Angeleno,...

At The Los Angeles Review of Books. In the postwar Fordist compromise, employers needed workers to master their jobs and stick around, at...

I neglected to post this when it happened, but Matt Seybold's The American Vandal podcast gathered me, Sarah Mesle and Aaron Bady to talk...

If you can join us in person in January, I hope you will. Incoming EIC is me. In the LARB newsletter, my friend and the phenomenal...

In November, I flew to New Orleans for The American Studies Association's annual meeting, on the theme The Roof Is On Fire. I got to...

I wrote about Synanon, and a strange set of personal connections I have to the history of that group, for this talk. Fingers crossed I...

I published this essay in Rare Bird Press's anthology of essays about Didion, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and writing in Joan...

The Lit Lit Fair at Hauser Wirth last weekend was super energizing. I spoke at LARB's panel about print and the Quarterly, picked up some...

He has a lot of insight into how nostalgia is its own trap — about what it means to love a city that doesn't know how to handle its own...

It has taken me 25 years, in a way, to write this essay. The past few weeks—scratch that—the past few years have been triggering for many...

(posted in 2020) My brilliant, dashing, loving father, Charles Chihara, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,...

A conversation about gig work, all work, listening to workers, and porn, with The American Vandal and Dr. Heather Berg

In Distinktion, Journal of Social Theory, in November I finally published "Radical Flexibility: driving for Lyft and the future of work...

https://marktwainstudies.com/theshush/ My friend and colleague Matt Seybold invited me and Kyla Wazana Tompkins onto his truly excellent...

At The Los Angeles Review of Books, I was part of a team of editors working on cluster of essays about developments in streaming media....

We rented a van and went on an epic road trip to the Grand Canyon, Moab desert, Arches National Park, the four corners area, Colorado...

I was part of a fantastic seminar at last March's ACLA, entitled "Consensus in Fragments: Literature, Normativity, and Social Trust after...

I'm excited to be part of a collection coming out soon from Bloomsbury, called New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives,...

"What might the field look like if it were to topple, or at least more thoroughly scrutinize, the reception of the realist novel as the...