Selected reporting (more here)
“Anatomy of a Product Placement,” The New York Times, June 2022.
“A Donkey Debuts at the Met Opera,” The New York Times, March 2022.
“Celebrity Book Club Goes Live,” The New York Times, February 2022.
“The Rise of the Tabulated Self,” New York Magazine, December 2021.
“The Online Auction Vortex,” New York Magazine, November 2021.
“The Challenge of Making an Archive of the Climate Crisis,” The New Yorker, October 2021.
“The Hidden Melodies of Subways Around the World,” The New York Times, August 2021.
“These Not-For-Sale Books Are Fetching Thousands,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, August 2021.
“Once Again, Fossils Are Hot,” The New York Times, June 2021.
“Caveh Zahedi Has So Many Stories to Tell,” The New York Times, June 2021.
“The Youth Prepare for Summer 2021, A Glorious Summer They’re Unlikely to Get,” The New York Times Magazine, May 2021.
“Does the Metaverse Need a Zoning Board?” Curbed, April 2021.
“What Does Masculinity Smell Like Now?” GQ Magazine, March 2021.
“For Sale: Souvenirs of Capitalism’s Failures,” The New York Times, January 2021.
“The Blockbuster Avant-Garde,” Art in America, January 2021.
“What Does History Smell Like?” The New York Times, December 2020.
“After Math,” The New York Times Magazine, September 2020.
“The Haunted House,” Harpers, September 2020.
“The Secret Lives of Objects in the Coronavirus Era,” The New York Times, August 2020.
“Museums are struggling to train their mostly white docents,” Slate, August 2020.
"When The Virus Came, Some Museum Curators Lost Years of Work," The New York Times, May 2020.
“The Scream is Fading.” New Research Reveals Why,” The New York Times, February 2020.
“The Many Requirements of Hold Music, A Genre For No One,” NPR Music, September 2019.
"When Crypto Meets Conceptual Art, Things Get Weird." The New York Times, June 2018.
“Should There Be An Emoji For Everything?” The New Yorker, July 2019.
“Martha Rosler Isn’t Done Making Protest Art,” The New York Times, November 2018.
“The Ephemeral Soundtrack of a New York Summer,” The New York Times, August 2018.
“Step Inside New York’s Art Fortress,” The New York Times, September 2019.
“The Art of the Internet, Restored and Out in the World,” The New York Times, January 2019.
“How Stone Stacking Wreaks Havocs on National Parks,” The New Yorker, December 2019.
"To Play Transgender, Sandra Caldwell Had to Open Up About Who She Is." The New York Times, August 2017.
“Screen beauties: flowers on the film set,” The Financial Times, September 2019.
“The Story of Amsterdam, Told Through Its Trash,” The New York Times, October 2018.
“How Ambient Chill Became The New Silence,” Topic, June 2019.
“A Room Without Books Is Just Very Sad,” The New York Times, May 2019.
“The Struggles of Small Museums,” The New York Times, May 2019.
“The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete,” The Atlantic, November 2018.
"$78,000 of Debt for a Theater Degree," The New York Times, August 2017.
"Meet the man behind the music at Logan Airport," The Boston Globe, August 2016.
Selected criticism and other nonfiction
“On BeReal and Boredom,” The New York Times Magazine, August 2022.
“The Ardor of Tessa Hadley, The Nation, May 2022.
“What Daily Routine Videos Actually Show Us,” The New York Times Magazine, January 2022.
“Watching the Weather,” The New York Times Magazine, March 2022.
“Those of Us Who Love the Dead,” Gawker, December 2021.
“Farewell to Anish Kapoor’s Accidental Half-Bean,” October 2021.
“Everything Under the Sun,” The Believer, October 2021.
“Persistence Pays,” The Drift Magazine, September 2021.
“The Strange Joy of Watching the Police Drop a Picasso,” New York Times Magazine, July 2021.
“Letter of Recommendation: Online Security Questions,” New York Times Magazine, July 2021.
“Needful Things,” Bookforum, July 2021.
“Have You Seen Me? : Lost Pet Signs,” Art in America, July 2021.
“Fiction Detective,” The Drift, April 2020.
“How ‘Things’ in Fiction Shape the Way We Read,” The Nation, April 2020.
“The Pandemic-Induced Popularity of Google Street View,” The New Yorker, February 2021.
“Arts and Statecraft,” The Baffler, February 2021.
“The Strange Voyeurism of Watching Someone Else Get Vaccinated,” The New York Times Magazine, January 2021.
“An Elegy for the Landline in Literature,” The New Yorker, July 2020.
“The Painter and the Painted,” The Nation, November 2020.
“Making Art ‘Bad’ Again: Shock, Protest, and Visual Art in the Age of Trump,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2020.
“Photos of locked down cities sold us fantasies,” The Guardian, November 2020.
“Sure as Fate: On Marilynne Robinson,” The Baffler, October 2020.
“Makeshift Refuges: Edith Wharton’s Home-Building,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2020.
“Net Art FTW,” The New York Times Opinion, August 2020.
“TikTok is the medium of global lockdowns,” The Guardian, May 2020.
“The Dizzying Experience of Visiting Virtual Museums,” Art in America, April 2020.
“Rewriting Roman Myths from the Perspective of the Victims,” The Nation, January 2020.
“The Museums of Instagram,” The New Yorker, September 2018.
“The Seductiveness of Insta-Nostalgia,” The New Yorker, January 2019.
“The Artist who Guides his Art with Crypto-Tokens,” The New Yorker, September 2018.
“San Francisco, Please Stand Up,” The Baffler, June 2019.
“Afternoon at the The Nap Factory,” The Baffler, October 2018.
“Nudging the Lexicon,” The Baffler, October 2018.
“Factory Blues,” The Baffler, October 2019.
“Bad Metaphors: I Don’t Have the Bandwidth,” Real Life Magazine, March 2019.
“Bad Metaphors: Recharge,” Real Life Magazine, August 2019.
“The California Photograph,” Popula, January 2019.
“The Faces of Google Street View,” Popula, January 2019.
"Down with the daily crime story." Popula, July 2018
"Why New York Needs Both the Post and the Daily News," New York Magazine, August 2018.
"News as Art in 2018." The Paris Review Daily, March 2018.
"Close Readings of the Police Blotter." The Paris Review Daily, December 2017.
"At a loss for words? Join the Bureau of Linguistical Reality." The Economist, June 2018.
"City parks belong to everyone. Right?" The Economist, May 2018.
"John Chiara, and California's Beauty and Terror." Guernica, April 2018.
"On Joan Didion, California Wildfires, Cryptohackers, and All That." Off Assignment, April 2018.