CLIPS
Before I went back to grad school, when I was a reporter at the now-defunct Boston Phoenix, my beat was "freaks, geeks, and the universities."
If you're looking for deep cuts about underground fight clubs and scam private schools, hit me up.
Reward offered for copies of the articles I published on 1) Prince and 2) hotel bars in the now-also-defunct The New Haven Advocate.
But I'm still on the board of the excellent Online Journalism Project.
RESEARCH
cultural studies, literary studies, media studies
THE REAL PRODUCTIVITY: CREATIVE REFUSAL AND CULTISH TENDENCIES IN ONLINE PRINT COMMUNITIES
Fall 2022
Chapter in New Directions in Print Culture Studies, from Bloomsbury, eds. Jesse Schwarz and Daniel Worden
Straddling the line between private diary and public ploy for online self-branding, between mindfulness and hustle, Bullet Journals don’t carry a specific politics. But BuJo do provoke questions, ultimately, about what journalers believe they are working toward. Print journaling communities online can, sometimes, open out onto wider horizons about what it means to live a productive life.
RADICAL FLEXIBILITY - DRIVING FOR LYFT AND THE FUTURE OF WORK IN THE PLATFORM ECONOMY
Nov 2021 - Distinktion, Journal of Social Theory
Driving for Lyft and the future of work in the platform economy
Distinktion: Journal of social theory.
The ‘unicorn’ rideshare company Lyft’s brand narrative has capitalized on and exploited the desire for flexibility in historically specific political contexts. In light of these sticky financialized appropriations of flexibility, this essay imagines radical flexibility as a willful re-appropriation. It explores ways that Lyft’s rhetoric might be redirected and resisted. In light of existing demands for collective or cooperative platforms, radical flexibility could be a galvanizing justification for a cooperative response to the Uberization of work, part of a broader horizon that reclaims flexibility, play, creativity, and
convenience as affects and practices outside of the wage relation.
THE RISE OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMIC MASCULINITY
Dec 2019 - American Literary History
The “Real Invisible Hand”: From Howard Roark to Homer Simpson and the Economy Explained.
On 6 September 2008, before Lehman Brothers had collapsed but after the churn in the housing markets had become apparent, National Public Radio international economics correspondent Adam Davidson launched a podcast called Planet Money (2008–),
with the tagline: “the economy explained.” And the economy, as it lurched toward a global meltdown, seemed a topic urgently in need of clarification.
NEOLIBERAL GASLIGHTING, QUALITY JOURNALISM, AND PODCASTS
August, 2020 - Post45 Contemporaries
In a cluster of essays on the 7 Neoliberal Arts, I looked at the podcast, and discussed the effort to make the narrative digitual audio company, Gimlet Media, into the "HBO of Podcasts." I show how that ploy depended on a deft — and disturbing — metafictional gaslighting of audiences.
EXTREME HOARDS - RACE, REALITY TELEVISION & REAL ESTATE VALUE DURING THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS
September 2020 - Postmodern Culture
Two hit reality television shows, just before 2008 and in the foreclosure crisis just after, disciplined particular economic subjects and naturalized historically specific immanent power structures. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition re-imagined the leveraged construction of massive houses in the exurbs. Its sentimentality and its reliance on ethnic minorities dove-tailed with the rhetoric of social justice that politicians used to push for deregulation of mortgage financing, then later facilitated the popular right-wing narrative blaming minorities. After the crash, Hoarders visually mimicked the stages of foreclosure. While Extreme Home Makeover sought to contain the bodies of the poor as static reserves of value in their own neighborhoods, Hoarders re-identified real estate value with normative mental health and commensurable white feminine domesticity.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FINANCE
September, 2015 - Los Angeles Review of Books
The idea that finance is the naturally complex lifeblood of our economy whose path only a rarefied group of white men can chart, and not the triumph of the middle man: that’s a trope. It’s a cultural narrative, with material consequences. It’s a cultural narrative that engages with the question of what is and isn’t real because, for example, only Goldman Sachs’s money was treated as real in the last crisis.
THE ROUTLEGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE & ECONOMICS
Routledge 2019 - Co-editor with Matthew Seybold
The study of literature and economics is by no means a new one, but since the financial crash of 2008, the field has grown considerably with a broad range of both fiction and criticism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics is the first authoritative guide tying together the seemingly disparate areas of literature and economics.
ESSAYS
January 2023
Annie Duke, the winningest woman in poker, wants you to think about quitting your job.
WHERE I AM FROM
Can you imagine being Quintana Roo? Can you imagine being told that all of the Didion myths and traditions, the fever dreams that haunted your commanding mother, were not yours? Not your inheritance? Wouldn’t you still long for mother’s amulets and organdy dresses? Dear reader, I long for them still.
TRUST ME: A VISIT FROM BOB WOODWARD
April 2021 - Politics/Letters
In his answers to both questions in my class, Woodward was forthright but clearly did not think it was important to consider how his subject position might affect either his reporting or the stories he chose to promote.
GETTING US THROUGH - DANCE CHURCH
February 2017 - Avidly.org
There is no proper way for a woman to cut her hair, let alone do anything right in this world.
So what is the role of middle class feminists who dance, who say YAASSSSS, or who write about passing personal concerns?
NEIGHBORS
November 2016 - Los Angeles Review of Books
I wanted, in that moment, to remind her about the Japanese neighbors and their farm. But then, as now, I felt shut down by the weight of history. For a moment my memory warped and faltered. Maybe she had meant something else. Maybe I had heard her wrong.
READING KATY PERRY
June, 2013 - Trop Mag & California Prose Anthology
What if “Teenage Dream,” a la Judith Halberstam, is both appealing to actual teenagers and deliberately engaging in a kind of temporal drag? Bear with me. You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream. She puts her hands up into golden California air, at a beach party...
"As it turns out, everything in the world of reality TV must get watched and catalogued."
n+1
FICTION
THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE
Santa Monica Review 2014
CHOOSE
May, 2017 - LARB Lit
FEMALE LEAD - OR A PITCH FOR A CHARACTER-DRIVEN ONE-HOUR PROCEDURAL TELEVISION SHOW
Spring 2012 - Santa Monica Review
COUNTING
Green Mountains Review 2008
"Power and masculinity affect and constitute each other."