Selected Work
The Slow, Troubling Death of the Autopsy
Elemental, September 2020 (Noted in Best American Science Writing 2021)
The first thing to know about how a real autopsy lab works is that everything TV taught you is wrong.
Eater, August 2019
To get through a stage (pronounced “stodge”), your desire to work in a kitchen had to be absolute because it was all you had. If you came out the other side, you were accepted.
Me? I broke after one week.
The Beautiful Art of Hassling Politicians in Animal Costumes
Cover story, The Washington Post Magazine, February 2020
That is why the people in mascot costumes matter. They aren’t just there to harry candidates. They are there to signal that, as seriously as our politicians take themselves — especially at a moment when the very future of democracy appears to be in peril — those same politicians are also, at some level, deeply silly. To forget that would be a grave error — because the alternative is seeing them as saviors.
Reality Bites: The Untold Story of Rocco DiSpirito and “The Restaurant”
Eater, November 2020
Noted in Best American Food Writing 2020
Thus were born a pair of conjoined twins no surgeon could sever: Rocco’s on 22nd Street, the restaurant, and The Restaurant, the show. Both began in fanfare and ended in ignominy.
McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell: The Art of Congressional Fanfiction
Longreads, September 2019
Ten years ago, it might have seemed ludicrous to think that people would be penning heroic epics about members of the U.S. Congress. But troubled times are fertile soil for heroes.
In the Dark All Katz Are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia
Hazlitt, February 2018
After about a year of postnuptial bliss my wife and I were sitting on the couch scrolling through Netflix options when somehow it came out that I had never seen Dirty Dancing, and just like that, the honeymoon was over.
Dispatches from the Swamp (recurring column)
The Rumpus, 2017-2019
For those of us who live in DC, numbness isn’t really an option: When you live in a political football it’s hard to ignore getting kicked.
Romper, May 2022
My mother never wrote for TV again, but the episode did have one lasting impact: For one year, it made her a member of the Writers Guild of America, which had great health insurance. She and my father could afford to have a baby — me — and I thanked her by blowing up her career.
Strega Nona is Not a Communist
Gawker, October 2021
I must insist everyone knock it off. Strega Nona is not your Marxist meemaw. Strega Nona is going to be the first one up against the wall.
Take the Words Judeo-Christian Out of Your Damn Mouth
The Rumpus, 2017
Striking a term from a national vocabulary isn’t easy, especially when that term carries a false veneer of respect. But it’s worth trying. Whether you mean it or not, to say “Judeo-Christian” is to conscript Jews into a vision of a Godly, purified America, and that has never, ever, ever worked out well for us. It’s co-opting, it’s colonizing, and it’s condescending. It has comprehensively infected our national political discourse, but so did syphilis, once upon a time, and we figured out how to cure that.
What Is the Most Truthful Onscreen Version of DC?
NYLON, 2017
Outside of no-reservation restaurants and gay kickball, nothing is more fashionable in D.C. than hating on The West Wing. To invoke it with any kind of earnestness at all is to invite derision tinged with pity, and liberal use of the phrase “sweet summer child.” But what we of this city cannot admit, none of us, is that we hate on The West Wing because we so desperately want it to be real, and we will never get over the fact that it is not.
The Ghost of King Solomon (Short Story)
Catapult, 2016
There are no old men in South Sudan, so I think this one must be a ghost. He appeared in the middle of the street, in the white light carved from the darkness by a passing Land Cruiser’s headlamp.
In Pursuit of Prodigy: The Last Samurai and Me
Catapult, 2016
Books are the cause of so many bad ideas. The cause of mine was Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, which came out in 2000, sold 100,000 copies, won every prize in sight, and then vanished.