Events

A plenary session at Theorizing the Web on the digital labor of sex work. With panelists Emma Caterine, Brian Fuss, N'jaila Rhee, and Stoya. More information. Pay-what-you-can. 

Sarah Jaffe & Melissa Gira Grant in conversation, moderated by Jennifer Pan, in celebration of the recent release of Guillotine #6: For Love or Money. More information. Free.

I'll be discussing my new story "For the Love of Kink" at the launch of the Spring 2014 issue of Dissent, "Our Technology and Theirs." Free. More information.

I’ll be reading for Guillotine at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York at The Literary Mews. Free. More information.

Panel discussion, hosted by Dissent at Left Forum. Panel time and date to be announced. More information.

Panel discussion with members of the English Collective of Prostitutes at Left Forum. More information.

OR Books and Chelsea Manning's supporters mark one year since she went on trial. Journalists, activists and artists (Chase Madar, Clark Stoeckley, Melissa Gira Grant, Max Thorn, Adam Klasfeld and more) who attended the trial will read from a new graphic book published this month, The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning. Free, with donations accepted for Chelsea Manning's appeal fund.

Speaking on the panel REVOLUTION AND REPRESSION: Sexuality, Gender, and Politics. with Mona Eltahawy (Headscarves and Hymens) and Thomas Page McBee (Man Alive), moderated by writer and activist Jennifer Baumgardner. Details.

Free and open to the public.

Launch for The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future, edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Featuring readings by contributors Ileana Jimenez, Madeleine Schwartz, Veronica Bayetti Flores, Julie Zeilinger, Karla Shickele, Melissa Gira Grant, Victoria Law, Daniel Jose Older, Charlotte Lieberman, and more.

A panel discussion as part of the Oakland Book Festival. Free and open to the public. More information.

Sex work continues to simultaneously titillate and scandalize the ever seducible bourgeoisie. But behind the peephole sensationalism and the hand-wringing is a ruthless economy and an army of workers to whom both progressives and conservatives persistently condescend. This panel will address the politics and criminalization of sex work, and the deeper socioeconomic prejudices and misconceptions that deny such labor dignity.

ELIZABETH ALICE CLEMENT is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah, and a prominent scholar of prostitution and the ways it broadens our understanding of race, gender, and class.

MELISSA GIRA GRANT is a writer covering sex, tech, and politics. Her latest book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, challenges the myths about selling sex and those who perpetuate them. She is a columnist at Pacific Standard, and her reporting has appeared in The Nation, Wired, The Guardian, Slate, Buzzfeed, and VICE.

RAMONA NADDAFF (moderator) is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and an editor of Zone Books. Author of Exiling the Poets: The Production of Poetry in Plato's Republic, she writes on philosophy and literature, and literary censorship.

Melissa is reading as part of Charlotte Shane's series, Bad Advice from Bad Women.

Join some of NYC’s finest strident writers for a special Emily Books edition of Bad Advice From Bad Women! Featuring Lana Del Rey poet laureate Niina Pollari, unapologetic coffee and TV addict Ruth Curry, heroin bard Jade Sharma, Zappos' favorite customer Chloe Caldwell, "not cold, just a New Yorker" Melissa Gira Grant, and bleak fame scholar Natasha Stagg. Hosted by laundry loving feminist failure Charlotte Shane.

Natasha Stagg published her first novel, Surveys, with Semiotext(e) / Native Agents this year. She is an editor and writer for several magazines in New York.

Ruth Curry is a writer and the cofounder of Emily Books.

Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York. Her first novel, Problems, was released in July of this year by CoffeeHouse & Emily Books. She has an MFA from the New School.

Chloe Caldwell is the author of the novella, Women and the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray. Chloe’s next essay collection, I’ll Tell You in Person, will release fall of 2016 from CoffeeHouse & Emily Books.

Niina Pollari is the author of Dead Horse (Birds LLC), which was named a "best independent book of the year" by Flavorpill.. She translated translated Tytti Heikkinen’s The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal, She also wrote two poetry chapbooks, both now sold out: one called Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace 2009) and one called Book Four (Hyacinth Girl, 2012). She also organizes the annual organize the POPSICKLE Festival, a day-long Brooklyn lit fest/reading at a different, nontraditional space each year.

Melissa Gira Grant is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. She's a columnist for Pacific Standard, and her reporting and commentary has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, VICE, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Dissent, among other publications.

Charlotte Shane is an essayist and author best known for her lyric personal writing, which garnered national attention when distributed in the form of her letters, now collected in the book Prostitute Laundry. The Guardian likened her work to Charles Dickens, and Vice has called it "addictive [and] intimate." She has contributed to many outlets including Matter, The New Inquiry, Pacific Standard, and Playboy, and is a columnist for Fusion.

Practitioners and creators from world-building disciplines such as art, fiction, architecture, and science gather at Data & Society’s second Future Perfect conference on June 8 to explore the “uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures.”

Data & Society INFRA Lead Ingrid Burrington curates presentations, readings, and games that played on the namesake verb tense of the already-happened: the robots will have taken our jobs; America will have already been made great (again); sea level rise will have destroyed major coastal cities; we will already be immortals living on Mars.

When viewing the future as a subject of trepidation or a site of inevitable triumph, powerful actors and institutions often fail to see alternative futures latent in the present, and rarely have answers for how one lives after these imagined tipping points of devastation–or profiteering.

Session 2: Voight-Kampff Tests
Dystopia Now: Erasing the Internet by Erasing Sex Workers
Melissa Gira Grant and Danielle Blunt

You wake up one morning to find your Google Drive has been deleted. There is no warning, no explanation. You try to tweet about it but no one replies. Your clients post payment but your credit card processor vanishes without a trace before the funds land in your account. You call your co-working space to explain why you’ll be canceling your reservation this week because your clients can’t reach you; they tell you they’re going out of business because they are in the same boat. 

Your phone number, your emails, your websites: all of the channels that you use to connect to do your work and build community are disappearing. How do you work? How do you make your voice heard? How do you participate in a community on social media that is actively being erased and silenced? What does security look like if the resources you are trying to secure are disappearing without warning or a trace?

This is not a fictional dystopian future; for sex workers, this is reality. On March 21st, 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) passed the Senate (97-2). President Trump signed FOSTA into law on April 11th. FOSTA was sold as “anti-human trafficking” legislation; however, what it actually does is give online platforms the power and incentive to censor their users for fear of  “facilitating” sex work. Its’ passage was followed with an immediate chilling effect, as platforms shuttered in anticipation of bankrupting lawsuits and possible criminal charges, and with some big platforms used by all kinds of people – like Reddit and Craigslist – deleting content before the law had even been signed. As a result, the already-marginalized communities who use the web to find work and build community around sex work were suddenly locked out. 

Go behind the crime tape and headlines to hear about what it takes to produce and investigate those heart-wrenching stories that transform us and become part of our popular culture. Whether through serial podcasts, TV series or the center of tabloid pages, these veteran producers and reporters provide their expertise on what makes a great story, series, a must-see interview or long-form investigations.

Moderator: Senta Scarborough
Panelists: Johnny Dodd, Tod Goldberg, Melissa Gira Grant, Christine Pelisek, Donna Rossi, Jeff Truesdell

About NLGJA
NLGJA is the premier network of LGBTQ media professionals and all dedicated to the highest journalistic standards in the coverage of LGBTQ issues.

SENTA SCARBOROUGH is an award-winning journalist and Emmy-nominated producer.  She is the founder of Sentamatic Media focusing primarily on screenwriting, journalism and nonfiction projects. Her work has appeared in Adweek, INTO, USA Today, E! News, Us Weekly Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, among others. She currently serves on the board of directors for the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. She holds her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California Riverside/Palm Desert. She lives in Los Angeles with her wife, Katie, and their dog, Sadie.

JOHNNY DODD is a staff writer for People, deployed in the trenches of pop culture. He also writes nonfiction books about true crime stories. Dodd appears in Investigation Discovery’s hit true crime series, “People Magazine Investigates,” now in its third season. The series draws upon original reporting from People’s award-winning true crime editorial team, delving into extraordinary tales of ordinary people thrust into the national spotlight.

TOD GOLDBERG is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including “Gangster Nation,” “Gangsterland,” “The House of Secrets,” and “Living Dead Girl.” His essays, journalism, and criticism appear widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and, recently, Best American Essays. A former columnist and book critic for a number of newspapers in Las Vegas, Tod Goldberg has won 5 Nevada Press Association Awards and was recently given the Silver Pen Award by the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. In addition, he is also the co-host of Literary Disco, and Open Book, a radio show on KCOD, the public radio station of the Coachella Valley. He holds an MFA fiction and literature from Bennington College and founded and directs the low residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside.

MELISSA GIRA GRANT is a journalist, author and senior staff reporter at The Appeal. She has been a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, covering criminal justice, LGBTQ and women’s rights, sex workers’ rights, HIV/AIDS and human trafficking. Her most recent book, “Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work,” has been translated into six languages.

CHRISTINE PELISEK is an award-winning crime reporter who has been covering the beat, most recently for People, for more than 15 years. She also covered crime and national news as a reporter for the ABC newsmagazine TV show “20/20” and the Daily Beast. While at the Daily Beast, she wrote about almost every national news story including the Aurora movie theater shooting, Newtown/Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro and the tornadoes in Oklahoma City. Prior to that, Pelisek worked at the LA Weekly as an investigative crime reporter. In 2008, during her tenure there, she broke the story that a serial killer who murdered women in South Los Angeles for decades had struck again in 2007, and she dubbed the killer the Grim Sleeper. She received a Certificate of Appreciation from the City of Los Angeles for her work on the case. Her book about the Grim Sleeper was released in June 2017. Pelisek appears in Investigation Discovery’s hit true crime series, “People Magazine Investigates,” now in its third season. The series draws upon original reporting from People’s award-winning true crime editorial team, delving into extraordinary tales of ordinary people thrust into the national spotlight.

DONNA ROSSI is a five-time Emmy Award-winning reporter  who has logged three decades covering and uncovering some of the most high-profile stories in the state of Arizona. Rossi started her professional journalism career at KNAZ – TV 2 in Flagstaff, Arizona, while still attending Northern Arizona University to complete her bachelor’s in broadcast journalism. She then moved to the CBS affiliate in Tucson, Arizona, and joined CBS 5 News in Phoenix. Rossi’s experience as a four-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department gives her a keen sense of crime and court stories. She is a past president of the Rocky Mountain Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and continues to serve on the NATAS Board of Governors. Rossi is the go-to emcee for many of the LGBT nonprofits in Arizona including Equality Arizona, Aunt Rita’s Foundation, One Community, One-in-Ten and Shanti. She is a past board member of AIDS Project Arizona. In fall 2018, Rossi will be inducted into the Arizona Broadcaster’s Association Hall of Fame and with become an adjunct instructor at the prestigious Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

JEFF TRUESDELL is a staff writer for People magazine, where he covers breaking news and true crime from cold-case mysteries to mass shootings. He contributes to the Investigation Discovery series “People Magazine Investigates” and executive produced the 2017 documentary “For Ahkeem” on themes of juvenile justice and the school-to-prison pipeline. He is an NLGJA national board member.

PANEL

09/20/18 //
6 to 9:30pm //
Part 1 of Hacking//Hustling is a panel discussion featuring presentations from sex workers and sex worker rights advocates discussing censorship, discrimination and policing in the wake of SESTA.

Panelists include:
Lorelei Lee, writer and sex worker
Kiara St. James, CEO and a co-founder of New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG)
Bardot Smith, analyst & dominatrix
Ashley Paige, international travel companion & connoisseur of kink

WORKSHOP

09/22/18 //
1 to 4pm //

In conjunction with our panel discussion, we’ll be hosting a half-day of workshops (in collaboration with t4tech) where sex workers and digital rights advocates will work together to address the harms of SESTA with a collaborative approach grounded in principles of harm reduction. We will learn how to to protect data, have safer communications, and build stronger online communities.

In an an effort to support this program and its participants and combat systemic inequities, we are implementing the following sliding-scale ticket pricing for this program. Sex workers will be admitted for free.

ORGANIZERS //

Melissa Gira Grant (she/her) is a senior staff reporter covering criminal justice at The Appeal and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She has been a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, and her work has also appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among others. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She lives in New York.
@melissagira

Danielle Blunt (she/her) is a NYC-based Dominatrix, a full-spectrum doula and sex worker rights activist. She studies power dynamics through kinesthetic modalities and researches the intersection of public health, sex work and equitable access to tech. Her work has appeared in Kink & Code, Tits & Sass and Psychology Today. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry.
@mistressblunt

PANELISTS //

Kiara St. James has been a community organizer and public speaker for over 20 years. She has been instrumental in changing shelter policies that were discriminatory towards the Trans community. Kiara is the Founder and current Executive director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG inc), A grassroots 501c-3 non-profit organization, that is Trans-led and intent on creating new opportunities for the Trans community, through various partnerships and innovative initiatives.
@kiaraditmas

Bardot Smith is the alias of an analyst, producer, and demimondaine living on the East Coast. She focuses her time on private consulting, erotic media production, and writing on economics and sex under capitalism. She enjoys pissing on men. She is currently studying for her Series 65.
@ICONOCLASTIAE

Lorelei Lee is a writer, sex worker, and activist. She began doing sex work in 2000 and has worked both on and offline. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, WIRED, Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, BuzzFeed, The Establishment, and $pread magazine, as well as in the anthologies Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, Off the Set, The Feminist Porn Book, and Coming Out Like A Porn Star.
@MissLoreleiLee

Ashley Paige is an International Travel Companion & Connoisseur of Kink
@AshleyPaigeNYC

WORKSHOP FACILITATORS //

t4tech is a free and accessible resource for transgender and GNC people to share and pick up skills of software engineering, digital technologies, and computer science. We work to enable trans and GNC people with the skillsets required to engage with and shape the tech community.

Daly Barnett is a software engineer and privacy advocate. She is the founder of t4tech, an organization that facilitates free tech education workshops for trans and gender-nonconforming people.
t4tech

Sophie is a Senior Data Scientist at Metis where she is a bootcamp instructor and leads curriculum development. Sophie works in deep learning and data science ethics. Through t4tech Sophie helps provide free trans-centered classes in programming and data science.
soph.info

ART

Throughout Hacking//Hustling participants are invited to view “Whores Will Rise: Protest Art & Resistance Ephemera Against FOSTA/SESTA,” a pop up community art show. Curated by Brit Schulte, the show highlights protest art/resistance ephemera from recent demonstrations against SESTA/FOSTA and calling for decriminalization and labor rights for all sex working/trading people.

CURATOR //

Brit Schulte (they/them) is a community organizer and under-employed sex working art historian currently splitting time between Chicago and New York City. They are a member of the Support Ho(s)e collective, Survived & Punished NYC and are the lead coordinator for the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign. Brit’s current organizing efforts center criminalized survivors, prison abolition and the decriminalization of all sex work/trade.

Candice Breitz, Melissa Gira Grant, Änne Söll and Nosipho Vidima talk about the stigma­ti­za­tion of sex work in the context of the exhi­bi­tion CANDICE BREITZ: SEX WORK (Salon Berlin of Museum Frieda Burda). Moder­ated by Monopol editor-in-chief Elke Buhr, the sympo­sium includes a visit to the exhi­bi­tion and an intro­duc­tion to the work of Candice Breitz by the artist herself.

‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’ . . . the 2009 Sundance winning documentary, which tells the story of web entrepreneur, social media visionary, artist / in the sense that Andy Warhol was, in the greater picture, & very outrageous master of ceremonies . . . JOSH HARRIS.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Propaganda, Surveillance, and the 21st-Century Vilification of Sex Workers

It’s been one year since President Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law, a bill its supporters said would protect women and girls from trafficking into the sex trade. In this talk, we will work to make sense of how an obscure, complicated law like SESTA/FOSTA pushed the issue of sex workers’ rights into the public square, while sex workers simultaneously experienced more censorship and platform discrimination online.

We will trace the paradox sex workers currently face to the historic role sex workers have been cast in—as disruptive, as others, as dirt—over a century of attempts to scapegoat sex workers in moments of political upheaval, the expansion of surveillance and the rapid spread of propaganda through new technologies, and the threat of authoritarianism. In those times, as in this one, fearmongering and propaganda enjoyed a feedback loop, creating an enabling environment for repression and violence. What can we learn about the current attacks on sex workers from the closure of red-light districts a century ago, or in the witch hunts of 500 years ago? This was the fallout of SESTA/FOSTA: lawmakers claimed they were protecting vulnerable women and children from the dangers posed by traffickers and the internet. Yet lawmakers created a situation where vulnerable communities were exposed to more violence—not hidden in plain sight, but simply ignored.

This event is free and open to the public.

Danielle Blunt is a NYC-based dominatrix, a full-spectrum doula, and a sex worker rights activist. She studies power dynamics through kinesthetic modalities and researches the intersection of public health, sex work and equitable access to tech. Currently she is getting her master's at the CUNY School of Public Health. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry.

Melissa Gira Grant is a senior staff reporter covering criminal justice at the Appeal and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She has been a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, and her work has also appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among other publications. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She lives in New York.

Red Light Reader is a book club that seeks to create a safe space for sex workers and allies. We seek to facilitate dialogue about sex worker rights, and its intersections with technology, race, migration, labor, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights.

May’s Book: Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant

Join your community for a celebration of Tina Horn’s new kinky queer sex work dystopian sci-fi comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex) from Image Comics: featuring a talkback with one of the best journos on the sex work beat, Melissa Gira Grant, and a special fetish cake-sitting by Lindsay Dye.

Tina Horn (she/her) hosts and produces the kinky sexuality podcast Why Are People Into That?!. She is a Rolling Stone reporter, the author of two nonfiction books, and the writer/creator of the scifi comic book series SFSX. Tina has lectured on sex work politics and queer BDSM cultures all over North America. @Tinahornsass / TinaHorn.net

Melissa Gira Grant (she/her) is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She has been a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, and her work has also appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among others. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She lives in New York. @melissagira

A roundtable on future political trajectories for the country after the chaos of Trump and his GOP allies.

With
Christopher Caldwell—journalist, author
Kimberlé Crenshaw—TNR contributor, author
Melissa Gira Grant—TNR staff writer
Michael Kazin—journalist, author, professor of history
Moderator: Chris Lehmann—TNR editor

RSVP to The New Republic

Note: This is a free Zoom event. You will be notified before the talk with the link to connect to the event.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, the host of the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, the moderator of the webinar series Under the Blacklight, and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School. She is popularly known for her development of “intersectionality,” “critical race theory,” and the #SayHerName campaign and is a leading authority on civil rights; Black feminist legal theory; and race, racism, and the law.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic. Melissa has reported on gender, sexuality, politics, and justice for more than a decade. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. Before coming to The New Republic, Melissa was a contributing writer at The Village Voice and Pacific Standard.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. He is the author of six books and the editor of three. His most recent is War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918, published in January 2017 by Simon and Schuster. It won the best book prize from the Peace History Society. He is currently completing a history of the Democratic Party, to be published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kazin is a former online columnist for The New Republic and has written articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and many other periodicals and websites.

Chris Lehmann has been editing The New Republic since early 2019. Formerly, he was editor in chief of The Baffler, co-editor of BookForum, managing editor of Yahoo News, senior editor of Congressional Quarterly, and deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World, among a host of other way stations in a long and colorful career. He has also been a politics columnist for the New York Observer and a culture columnist for In These Times. He’s the author of three books, most recently The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

A panel discussion on the state of the alt-right in the post-Trump era

With

Rick Perlstein—historian, journalist
John Ganz—journalist
Tess Owen—senior reporter, Vice News
Melissa Gira Grant—TNR staff writer
Moderator: Chris Lehman—TNR editor

RSVP to The New Republic

Note: This is a free Zoom event. You will be notified before the talk with the link to connect to the event.

John Ganz is a journalist. His work has been seen in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Baffler, and The New York Times.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic. Melissa has reported on gender, sexuality, politics, and justice for more than a decade. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. Before coming to The New Republic, Melissa was a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at The New Republic. He most recently was editor in chief of The Baffler, and author of the former “Jaundiced Eyeball” and “The Blessed and the Brightest” columns. He remains editor at large at The Baffler. He’s previously held roles at Newsday, New York magazine, The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, and Yahoo! News, and published the books “Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class” and “The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity and the Unmaking of the American Dream”.

Tess Owen is a reporter with VICE News covering extremism, hate crimes, and gun control. Since joining VICE in 2015, she has written extensively about white supremacy and nationalism, including the American neo-Nazi movement. She is a two-time winner of the Newswomen Award for Investigative Reporting. Owen earned a MS in Journalism from Columbia University, and holds a BA in English literature from Mount Holyoke College.

Rick Perlstein is the author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. Before that, he published Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. A contributing writer at The Nation, former chief national correspondent for the Village Voice, and a former online columnist for The New Republic and Rolling Stone, his journalism and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, and many other publications.