First, a few writing samples:
The Delirium of COVID-19 - Slate.com
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown vs. Charlie & Lola - Slate.com
The Ghost Distilleries of Single Malt Scotch - Saveur Magazine
On Mitt Romney and Mormonism - The New York Times
The Hogwarts Headache - The New York Times
A couple of books:
13th-GEN: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail - contributing author - Random House
Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation - contributing author - W.W. Norton & Co.
A short play:
K, X, Z, and V - performed all around the U.S. - Playscripts, Inc.
Film and TV:
Adapted from a play I wrote called "The Last American Liberal", the short film Election Night was selected for the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, starring Peri Gilpin ("Frasier").
I write and pitch television with Tessa Blake (who, conveniently enough, is also my wife). Our first development deal was with Bad Robot and Touchstone Television, and since then, we've enjoyed script deals with Warner Brothers, NBC/Universal, ABC, ABC Studios and FOX.
More? Well, okay…
When this picture was taken back in the Pleistocene Era, I had just spent the evening doing upside-down melonball shots at a party house that had stolen a dentists' chair for that purpose. Hence my pretending to write all over a yearbook page from 1952. But the NYT picked me because I'd had a column in the newspaper, and I knew how to string words together - and sometimes that's enough to get you started. That, and obviously my hair was awesome.
My family were musicians, my dad was a symphony conductor who kept moving us to a new town with a better orchestra. I went to grade school in eastern Iowa; middle school in London, England; a prep school in Tidewater, VA; then landed at the amazing University of North Carolina, where my suitemates collected their tobacco spittle in empty 2-liter Coke bottles. I'm not lying, they displayed them on their bookshelves with a pride that was both perverse and sincere. It was there I wrote the oddly-viral article Why I Hate Duke and its sister article Why I Still Hate Duke.
Then I set out to do every kind of writing possible: after the two books, I was the editor of two major websites back in the internet's first gasp, wrote and shot a disastrous indie film comedy, penned two off-off-Broadway shows, wrote the short film that ended up at Cannes, kept a blog for 12 years that led to fun magazine work, and now I pitch and write TV shows that I would have liked as a kid staying up too late.
We have a daughter who is so wonderful I can't believe I was even partially responsible. These days we work from Venice Beach, but the only place we can truly hang our hat is up in the Taconic Range of New York, at a tiny farm where nothing really works. I grow misshapen fruit, tap (and spill) maple sap for syrup, and do a lot of weird shit that doesn't make us any money.
I can do Morse Code at 35 wpm because 7th grade was not a good time for me. I can write in four different calligraphy fonts, five if I've opened an Ardbeg single malt. I separate my dark clothes from the whites, and I know which cups are top-rack dishwasher safe. If you feel something, I will feel it with you. And you can find me here:
