ESSAYS
“Nella Larsen’s Passing,” The Atlantic (March 14, 2024), for the magazine’s round-up of great American novels.
“You Can’t Go Home Again” (on nostalgia), The Hedgehog Review (Spring 2024).
“The Small-Business Smokescreen,” The Baffler (January 24, 2024).
“Quiet Quitting: Franz Kafka’s Work-Life Imbalance,” Bookforum (Summer 2023).
“The Corporatization of Creativity,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 24, 2023).
“The Secret to a Good Conversation,” The Atlantic (July 20, 2023).
“Idlers of the World, Unite!”, Jewish Currents (Winter 2022).
“Why Are We Obsessed with the Idea of Hard Work?” Boston Globe (December 2, 2022).
“The Darker Side of Bambi,” The Yale Review (November 30, 2022).
“H.D.’s Art of Failure,” New Yorker (October 21, 2022).
“The Secret of How We Move” (on dance), The Atlantic (October 18, 2022).
“Theater of Shame,” The Yale Review (Fall 2022).
“Liz Kid” (on Darryl Pinckney and Elizabeth Hardwick), Bookforum (Fall 2022).
“An Untimely Birth” (memoir-essay on growing up as a triplet), The Point (April 13, 2022).
“How Charles Dickens Made the Novel New,” The Atlantic (March 15, 2022).
“The New Neurasthenia” (on burnout), The Baffler (March 15, 2022). Translated into Dutch for 360 Magazine.
“How Elizabeth Taylor Remade the Novel of Old Age,” New Yorker (February 2, 2022).
“Do the Numbers Lie?” (on quantification and the humanities), The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 27, 2022).
“The Talented Mr. Thiel,” The Baffler (September 20, 2021). Translated into French for a volume of essays on the ideologies of Silicon Valley.
“The Man Who Saved Capitalism from Itself” (on John Maynard Keynes), The Hedgehog Review (Summer 2021).
“Why Are We So Spiteful?” The Atlantic (May 13, 2021).
“The Apocalyptic New Campus Novel,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 22, 2021).
“Who Killed Nordic Noir?” Public Books (January 21, 2021). Interview on Radio New Zealand. Translated into Turkish for T24.
“The Wagner Effect,” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2020).
“Is Academe Awash in Liberal Bias?” (with Naomi Oreskes), The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 14, 2020).
“The Professor of Gimmicks,” (analytic profile of Sianne Ngai), The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 25, 2020).
“The Rise of Reassurance Lit,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 28, 2020).
“Elizabeth Strout’s Compassionate Realism,” The New Rambler Review (December 18, 2019).
“Under the Sign of Sontag,” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2019).
“Idleness,” The Point (Fall 2019). Reprinted in LitHub as “What Would a World with Less Work Look Like?”
“Apocalypse Chic,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (August 22, 2019).
“Do Something!” (review of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing), The Hedgehog Review (Summer 2019).
“A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM” (interview with E. O. Wilson), The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 7, 2019).
“Art-School Confidential” (on visual-arts MFA programs), The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 9, 2018).
“Why Professors Distrust Beauty” (review-essay of two books on sexual selection), The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 3, 2018).
“Virtuosos of Idleness” (on the Bloomsbury Group), The Hedgehog Review (Spring 2018).
“In Defense of Autodidacticism,” The Millions (October 6, 2017).
“A Town’s Own Story: Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy,” Los Angeles Review of Books (May 28, 2017).
“The Loneliness of the Gay Aesthete: Alan Hollinghurst and Queer Theory,” Los Angeles Review of Books (March 9, 2017).
OTHER WRITING ON HIGHER EDUCATION & JUVENILIA
Assorted reporting for Inside Higher Ed: Topics covered include for-profit higher education; academic urban legends; replication controversies in education research; HBCUs. (For more of my Inside Higher Ed reporting, click here.) See also a report on student building monitors, for Slate.
As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, where I served as executive editor of The Cavalier Daily, I was widely recognized for my coverage of the sudden ouster of U-Va. president Teresa Sullivan; my FOIA-based reporting played a role in Sullivan’s subsequent reinstatement. Some of this reporting was published in The Nation.
You can read more about my undergraduate journalism work in the Washington Post and UVA Magazine.