I write features, news items, and reviews for the British architecture/design magazine icon. In May 2006 they ran my feature on the Hearst Tower by Norman Foster; in September 2006, one on Jean Nouvel's Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; in February 2007, one on Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art by Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Only some of the print magazine's content goes online at icon; for many of the pieces I've written there, you'll need hard copy. Shorter pieces of interest at this site include my review of the Museum of Modern Art's show "Safe" and my review of Les Freres Corbusier's play "Boozy." (They cut my reference to lyricist Doug Cohen, whose songs add a lot to this smart weird piece of highbrow farce, so I'll plug him here: Doug, you're a wizard, a true star.)
Here are two more architectural features that made it to the Web, both at UK-based publications: one on a Hudson Valley house renovated by Messana O'Rorke in the RIBA Journal and another Hearst Tower feature in BD magazine. Rule Britannia!
A long time ago I was a full-time medical journalist, and in 2006 I resumed work in that area, contributing to the "News and Perspective" column in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. (That's the part written by journalists, not the peer-reviewed part written by MDs.) The first of these, on physician-owned specialty hospitals (for which POSH is more than an acronym), was a two-parter on the general phenomenon and some political responses and specific cases. Another piece in this series, inspired by a comment from a Phoenix-based source for the POSH piece, discussed how suburban sprawl affects emergency medical infrastructure -- an area of overlap between two subjects I find pretty interesting. There are more of these pieces; rather than revise this page each time a new one appears, I'll just provide the departmental link here.
I banged out a piece every couple of months during 2005 for the "NY Insider" column at AskANewYorker.com. These are at the site's archive page, along with some by other contributors (nobody's name appears on this page; click the titles instead). "The Real NY? Fuhgeddaboudit!" contrasts the media's NYC with the real one (March 2005). My second column in this series (April) covers a few things about Mets fans and Yanks fans and how they got that way. Column #3, "Location, Location" for May, covers the city's specialized shopping districts. For July-August, there's one on the meaning of "back in the day" for New Yorkers, but the link to that one vanished. In October I asked the musical question "Is NYC still the nation's prime rock & roll city?" and answered mostly in the affirmative, with caveats about good clubs being devoured by the real-estate marketroids (who have gobbled up more clubs since the piece came out, rendering it almost immediately out-of-date). The last of these columns (December 2005) looks at NYC's current architecture boom.
My bio at the bottom of the Ask A New Yorker pieces identifies me as the editor of the East Village Guide. This was accurate at the time. The Guide was to have been a print spinoff of Eric Ferrara's excellent community website east-village.com (not to be confused with a very different local site using a similar name, but unhyphenated). Launching print publications is difficult; this one came very close to happening. Plans for the Guide are on hold for the time being, but in the meantime, one piece that I initially prepared for the Guide's debut issue, an interview with the poet and Bowery Poetry Club impresario Bob Holman, appeared at the website instead. Bob and Eric both do fantastic work and deserve applause and support. So does the effort to keep the EV hospitable to small weird arty enterprises, not big boring chain stores and deep-pocketed dunces. But I digress.
"Ducking the Snovian Disjunction: The 'Both/And' Logic of Mason & Dixon" -- from my days as a literary scholar, though an aggressively interdisciplinary one -- appears in the original version that I delivered at International Pynchon Week, London, 6/12/1998. A later version of this talk, expanded and revised, appears as "Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction," in Copestake, Ian, ed., American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon (Bern: Peter Lang GmbH, 2003), 83-127.
The most widely cited academic piece of mine is probably "The Fable of the Ants: Myopic Interactions in DeLillo's Libra," in Postmodern Culture 4.2, 1994. It was reprinted in Ruppersburg, Hugh, and Tim Engles (eds.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (NY: G. K. Hall, 2000), 213-228. An alternate version, resembling the original PMC publication back when PMC appeared only in e-mail form, is here.
"Interpreting the Cathedral of Gaia: the Working Lab as Cultural Icon." 21stC 2.1 (1996). This is the only piece to appear over my byline in 21stC, though by no means the only thing I wrote for the magazine. Also the only piece of mine to be translated into French ("Et écoutent les plantes se parler entre elles," Le temps strategique, Geneva, 78 [1997]:96-97). The full 21stC archive at Columbia reflects my work as an editor.
A cyberculture article of mine in the academic journal Works and Days was once available online, but it appears they've taken down that archive; the closest you can get is now a table of contents here, and you need to scroll down to Vol. 13 (1995, "CyberSpaces") to find my title, and they charge for the back issues. Better to find a good bricks-and-mortar library for this, I think.
"Bargaincounterculturalcapitalism: Gear and Writhing at the New Music Seminar," PMC 3.2 (1992). Cultural Studies, with pistols blazing and a buzz on. This one involves music-industry people and opens with an anecdote that probably shouldn't be read out loud to children. If you have access to Johns Hopkins U Press's Project MUSE, you can get a more readable version of it here.
Friends from Amherst may recognize a bit of autobiographical reflection that I contributed to the Class of '80 Reunion Book. This is the full version that everyone involved meant to publish (a long story). Of personal interest only.