ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I write books and essays. I’m the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper, 2008), a national bestselling narrative history; co-author with Peter Manseau of the experimental travelogue Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press, 2004); and co-editor of Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon, 2009). I recently completed a collection of essays to be published by W.W. Norton titled What They Wanted, and I’m working on a short book about love, guns, and democracy to be published by Little, Brown, and an even shorter book about sex, violence, and a folk song to be published by Basic Books. I’m editing an anthology of literary journalism about American religion for Yale University Press tentatively titled “American Religion: A History in Pieces.” I’m an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College and a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
I began writing in 1990 as a student of Michael Lesy at Hampshire College and continued at a West Coast alt weekly, the San Diego Reader, where I spent my days searching for drama in the back of a Naval courtroom and my nights learning San Diego street life from junkies. Back in New York I interned at The Nation for the late, great cultural journalist Andy Kopkind and worked as an arts editor for a free paper that doubled as insulation for the homeless. I then leapt into relevance as editor-in-chief of Pakn Treger, the world’s only English-language glossy magazine of Yiddish culture, published by the National Yiddish Book Center. I visited the last Yiddish movie star, spent weeks with the last great Yiddish writer, and went to Madrid on the last voyage of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Lots of lasts. I also got to be the first national publisher of my friend and since-then collaborator Peter Manseau, as well as several other writers and artists of whom I’m an admirer: Ben Katchor, Harvey Pekar, Francine Prose, Robert Pinsky, Ruth Wisse, Aharon Applefeld, Chava Rosenfarb, Allen Hoffman, and Ilan Stavans among them.
In 1998, money got tight at the Yiddish Book Center. Word came down from on high that I should avoid stories that might upset donors — that is, stories that touched upon, sex, politics, or religion. With nothing left to write about, I quit, sold my Yiddish copies of Hemingway and Kafka to collectors for cash, and set out to write a Yiddish novel in English ripped off from all the wonderful letters I’d received from ancient Yiddishists. But I wasn’t worthy of the stories I meant to steal, and I ended up moving to Washington to take a job as “humanities writer” for The Chronicle of Higher Education, another publication that’s obscure to all but the initiated — and another lucky break. I spent the next three years in The Chronicle’s version of grad school, traveling the country and the world asking the most interesting scholars I could find the dumbest questions I could think of. In early 2000, Peter Manseau interrupted my patchwork education with an idea for an online literary magazine to be called KillingTheBuddha.com, which in 2004 led to a book coauthored with Peter, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press), a travelogue based on a year Peter and I spent exploring the margins of faith — a cowboy church in Texas, a military pagan coven in Kansas, a Pentecostal exorcism in North Carolina. The book was celebrated on NPR’s Morning Edition as “a mix of hymn and history, poem and prophecy, story and sermon.”
From 2003-9, I was an an associate and then visiting research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, where I taught literary journalism and American religious history. At NYU, working with Kathryn Joyce and Jay Rosen I created the media criticism site TheRevealer.org with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust. It’s now in the hands of Ann Neumann and Nicole Greenfield.
In addition to Harper’s and Rolling Stone, I’ve written for Mother Jones, New York, The Nation, New Statesman, The New Republic, Oxford American, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Nerve, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Forward, and Pakn Treger. This past year I’ve been a semi-regular guest on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show”; I’ve also made appearances on or in Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Hardball,” CNN, NPR, BBC, CBC, Air America, Radio France, The New York Times, Newsweek, and other media venues. My work has been features in Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing collection twice despite my inability to sing any song but “Down to the River.” I live on the edge of a glacier somewhere in New England with my wife and one-year-old daughter, who really appreciates my unique rendition of “Down to the River.”
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