Barack Obama Wants You (To Spill Your Secrets)

Is the Obama administration’s job application unnecessarily invasive in its questions about internet use? I wrote about this for Salon.com.

What If Harvey Milk Had Lived?

A question I explored for The Advocate.

Videodroning: The Essential Roisin Murphy

I’ve written for Paper about the new global pop queen Roisin Murphy.

Over-30 Facebook Disasters

A piece I wrote for Salon about post-collegiates and beyond crashing the kids’ online pool party. It involves defecation in hot tubs and obscene status updates.

Seven Days in October 1998

An oral history of the week after the attack on Matthew Shepard.

The Invisible Man: Arthur Russell Resurrected

 

Arthur Russell is the best musician you’ve probably never heard of, and unlike many artists to whom that label applies, he actively courted anonymity, recording tapes at home and under silly aliases like Dinosaur L and Loose Joints. In most of his photographs he’s wearing headphones as if they were a magic invisibility helmet, turning his painfully pockmarked face from the camera, hiding behind a perpetual blink, or staring, sad-eyed, at some point beyond the lens, as if willing himself to fade from the frame.

He didn’t get his wish. Although Russell’s life ended early — he died of AIDS complications in 1992 at age 40 — today, he looms large over modern music.

Open Your Eyes And See/What We Have Made Is Real

A piece I wrote for New York magazine, “Springtime for Xanadu”, has been honorably mentioned in Best Music Writing 2008. In this category, it joins some humbling company: Kelefa Sanneh of The New Yorker, Jon Caramanica of The New York Times, Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post (who won a Pulitzer for his entry) and (the one, the only) Patti Smith.

A nice shout-out from Idolator is here.

Why not buy the book. (It will be published on Oct. 6 by Da Capo Press, and was edited by the esteemed Daphne Carr and Nelson George.)