Journalism

Books

“True Grit” (review of Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto) (The New Republic)

“Departments on the Defensive” (review of John Guillory’s Professing Criticism) (The New York Review of Books)

“The Love Song of T.S. Eliot” (review of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl) (The New Republic)

“Have Method Actors Gone Too Far?” (review of Isaac Butler’s The Method) (The New Republic)

“The End of Freedom” (review of Louis Menand’s The Free World) (The New Republic)

“The People We Know Best” (review of several books on character) (The New York Review of Books)

“To Err Is Poetic” (review of Erica McAlpine’s The Poet’s Mistake) (The New York Review of Books)

“William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt” (review of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words) (The New Republic)

“Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (The New Yorker)

“The Spread” (review of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School) (The Nation)

“Caught on Tape” (review of Lytle Shaw’s Narrowcast) (Poetry Foundation)

“Edward Gorey’s Strange Ambitions” (The New Republic)

“Who Owns Kafka?” (The Nation)

“Coming to Terms with Ezra Pound’s Politics” (The Nation)

“Marianne Moore’s Sexist Reception” (LitHub)

“How Poets Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Academy” (Chronicle Review)

“How Should We Grieve John Ashbery?” (New Republic)

“The Mysteries of John Ashbery” (The New Republic)

“The Baggy Monster” (review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot) (The Nation)

“Everything Is Interesting” (review of Nicholson Baker’s Substitute) (The Nation)

“Scandal in Bohemia” (review of Jill Lepore’s Joe Gould’s Teeth) (The New Republic)

“Suspicious Minds: On Luc Boltanski” (n+1)

“Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature” (The New Republic)

“Down the Rabbit Hole: The Rise of Literary Annotation” (The New Republic)

“My Idol, the Worst Rapper Ever” (review of Leon Neykakh’s The Next Next Level) (The New Republic)

“How to Bash Bureaucracy” (review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules) (Chronicle Review)

“The 60s According to Morris Dickstein” (review of Morris Dickstein’s Why Not Say What Happened) (Chronicle Review)

“The Calling” (review of Stanley Fish’s Versions of Academic Freedom) (Dissent)

“No, the Internet is Not Killing Culture” (review of Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash) (Slate)

“Into the Ether” (review of Greil Marcus’ The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs) (Los Angeles Times)

“A Secondary Art: The Letters of Malcolm Cowley” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Love, Factionally” (review of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste) (Public Books)

Review of The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (Los Angeles Times)

“Ismism” (review of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines) (London Review of Books)

“Watch the Professor!” (review of Aaron Lecklider’s Inventing the Egghead) (The Point)

“Chiquita Banana Jingle” (review of Timothy D. Taylor’s The Sounds of Capitalism, Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format, and Chris Ruen’s Freeloading) (n+1)

“Poets, Protesters, and Proletarians” (review of Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century) (The New Republic)

“The Left-Facing Page” (review of Michael Szalay’s Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party) (Bookforum)

“Artifacts Only: On Jonathan Lethem’s Fear of Music (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Television & Film

“Just Kids: Growing Up with the Kids in the Hall” (Medium)

“The Surrealist Grace of Donald Glover’s Atlanta (The Nation)

“TV’s Dystopia Boom” (The Nation)

“Errol Morris’ Paranoid Style” (The Nation)

“A Questionable Cure for Impotence” (The New Republic)

Review of Junun (The New Republic)

“The One That Got Away: On Inherent Vice (Avidly)

Television recaps for Dear Television: LARB, New Republic, Talking Points Memo (2011-2016)

Film reviews for Not Coming to a Theater Near You (2007-2013)

Personal Essays / Cultural Commentary / Misc

“Just Kids: Growing Up with the Kids in the Hall” (Medium)

“Unhappy Accidents (Quarantine Journal)” (The Point)

“How the Proust Questionnaire Went From Literary Curio to Prestige Personality Quiz” (The New Yorker)

“People Sorters” (The New Inquiry)

“Your Opinion of You” (Pacific Standard)

“I Did Not Approve This Message” (Paris Review Daily)

“Moonlighting” (Avidly)

“Train in Vain” (n+1)

Interviews

“Affectionate, Yet Arch: An Interview with Vanessa Davis” (Paris Review Daily)

“Visions of the Ordinary in Willowbrook: An Interview with Rosten Woo” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Hoozy Thinky Is? An Interview with Wayne White” (Los Angeles Review of Books)