In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]
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The NYTimes’ Room for Debate recently posed this question: Is Criticism of Identity Politics Racist or Long Overdue? Some complain of being unfairly accused of bigotry. Others say discrimination needs to be directly addressed. I was invited to participate on the panel of debaters. Below is my contribution which you can also access here. The attack on political […]
This piece took ten years to place. I first drafted some of the arguments found in my new piece, Trumpworld, in 2006 while I was working at The Washington Post. Then, as now, political chatter centered on border security issues, an “invasion” via the U.S. Mexico border. Politicians and the press considered the function of the border […]
In the Spring I was invited to speak at the Power of Narrative conference in Boston. I remember attending the conference years ago, admiring the speakers and imagining–hoping for–the opportunity to write long form narrative pieces. To be invited to speak was huge honor. The conference was also the setting where famed writer Gay Talese […]
_ This piece seems to be increasingly relevant in this, ahem, interesting, election season. Earlier in the year a “taco war” broke out between Austin and San Antonio after a clearly confused New York-based writer crowned Austin the home of the “breakfast taco.” The outbreak of rhetorical war contained much more than simply a dispute over a […]
In late January, I traveled to West Texas, to Terlingua, at the invitation of an innkeeper who offers space to writers and artists. As these things often do, the entire experience came together through a delicate mix of resolve and serendipity. A few weeks earlier I had been camping out at her coffeeshop, working after hours […]
On April 2, at the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston, I will deliver a talk on External and Internal Landscape as it has to do with narrative journalism. Landscapes contains ideas and writings from the last decade of wandering, confusion, and questioning and, at times, anguish. I became aware of the internal landscape in 2005 after I landed in […]
On February 18, 2016, I will be speaking at the The Media Consortium‘s annual conference. The panel, “What Do freelancers Want” will cover, fees, contracts and the delicate dance of the editor-writer relationship. If you are in Philadelphia, drop by. If you are an independent journalist and unable to attend, send over your thoughts and insights to […]
In Summer 2013, I came across a boy waving down passing cars for help along a remote country road in South Texas. He had no way of knowing it, but the boy was stranded in the middle of Brooks County, a large swath of ranch land that has become a cemetery for lost migrants. I picked […]
In Fall 2015, I returned to UT-Austin, my alma mater, as a visiting lecturer in the Radio-Television-Film department. I designed the audio documentary course to explore the overt and subtle role of the ‘I’ in media storytelling. In an era of the selfie, crafted visual images on Instagram and the Serial podcast, the Self is peddled […]
