When I was in high school I sent a story I’d written to National Lampoon.
It was the first story I ever mailed out. About three weeks later I got a rejection letter. This thrilled me so much that I framed it and hung it on my bedroom wall. Looking back, I may have been a little unclear as to how freelancing worked.
Shortly after graduating from college I sent an unsolicited story to Harper’s Magazine. It was also rejected, but the editor called me and said that if I was ever in New York I should stop in and say hello. A few weeks later, I did. We talked for 30 minutes. I pitched a profile of the guy who wrote the book How to Pick Up Girls. (He had just published a sequel called How to Pick Up Women.) The editor assigned me the story. I wrote it. He rejected it.
I kept writing. I sent a story to The Atlantic. The rejection letter that followed said my story was “thin and unoccasioned.” I still don’t know what that means. I kept sending pitches to The Atlantic. A lot of them. Twelve years later, they signalled defeat and assigned me a story. It was about an historic tiki bar in Ohio slated for demolition. They published it. I’ve done about fifty stories for The Atlantic since.
Over the years I’ve written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications, including New York Times, The Daily Beast, Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Garden & Gun, American Scholar, Yankee, American Archeology, and others. All of this is to suggest that persistence pays.
The topics I’m drawn to usually involve discovering a sense of place — whether though local drink, food, architecture, archeology, or just asking questions of people I meet and then going wherever that takes me.
I currently contribute regularly to Imbibe, and Garden & Gun, among others. I also teach nonfiction techniques and digital storytelling at the graduate writing program of Johns Hopkins University.
If you’re an editor, I’m thinking you should probably hire me.
Rum became a minor obsession of mine nearly two decades ago.
Then it became a major obsession. I had noticed rum was always peering out from behind the curtains of American history — the slave trade, the American Revolution, fraternizing with pirates and temperance leaders. Why? I didn’t know, but I suspected the answer might yield an interesting tale. So I spent an unhealthy amount of time in libraries, and then an even unhealthier amount of time in bars. Turned out, rum did have a pretty good story. My book about rum’s sometimes sordid, always colorful past, was first published in 2006, then revised and updated in 2018.
This research led to my wanting to know about whiskey and brandy and gin and amaro and their stories. I’m pleased to report that I found magazine editors willing to pay me to investigate this. I wrote a cocktail and spirits column for The Atlantic between 2008 and 2014, and covered various aspects of drink for Wired, National Geographic Traveler, enRoute, Yankee, and Private Clubs, among others. I’m currently a spirits and cocktail columnist for The Daily Beast, Imbibe, Spirited, and Garden & Gun.
The spirits world has gone through remarkable growth and transformation over the past decade or two, which has made writing about it endlessly fascinating. I’ve written more than 200 stories about the people and places of the spirits world since I started down this road, and I don’t see an end in sight.
specimens
When And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails came out in 2006, two craft distillers made rum. Today, more than 200 do. So I updated the book in 2018. Buy it here or here.
The Atlantic: The New Science of Old Whiskey. How bourbon makers are improving upon a 2,000 year-old invention. (Nov 2013)
Daily Beast: In Search of Campari Red. A trip to Mexico in search of the insect that gave Campari its distinctive color. (Feb 2018)
American Scholar: Why the World’s Best Cocktail is from New Orleans. An ode to the Sazerac. (Oct 2015)
Wired: One Man’s Quest to Make 20-Year-Old Rum in 6 Days. How Bryan Davis mixed high-tech and theme park to more rapidly age liquor. (May 2017)
Yankee: The Education of Raj Bhakta. Whistlepig’s founder moved to Vermont to start his brand. But blending in was not in his DNA. (July 2017)
Punch: Reconsidering Armagnac. The best way to make a spirit of the moment is to make it for the ages. (Feb 2015)
Most everybody walks. Some more willingly than others.
Edward Payson Weston was among the willing, In 1909 he walked from New York to San Francisco in 105 days, averaging about 40 miles a day. Also, he turned 70 years old the day he started. Weston’s remarkable feat is the launch point for my nonfiction book, The Last Great Walk. What happens when humans evolve five million years to become adroit distance walkers, then devote a century forgetting everything they’ve learned? Spoiler alert: the early results aren't good.
I got interested in Weston’s story through a happenstance reference in a century-old newspaper. I was drawn in to his story in part owing to my long-time enjoyment of putting one foot in front of another. I was the first editor of American Hiker magazine, published by the American Hiking Society, and before that a contributing editor at Backpacker. Walking has never gotten old for me, even as I have.
A more recent interest in architecture and urbanism merged with the elemental pleasure of a long walk. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that choosing to travel by car rather than foot was among the most radical social experiments humans have ever attempted.
specimens
The Last Great Walk was published by Rodale in 2014. It traces Edward Payson Weston’s remarkable walk west, and uses his journey as a launch point to examine what’s happened to our bodies, our minds, and our landscape since we’ve traded in feet for motors.
The Smart Set. Pimp My Walk. Walking canes were once the 22-inch rims with spinners for urbanites who wanted to convey their stature. (April 2013)
Punch. What Walking Can Teach Us About Drinking. A long walk in the city is like a long walk in the backcountry. But with less chance of contracting giardia from a mountain stream. (Sept 2014)
The Atlantic. Walking for a Better Brain. Studies show that walking regularly isn’t just good for your body. It also sustains mental acuity as we age. (Oct 2014)
The Smart Set. How to overcome the argument that walking is too slow. Americans disdain walking in part because it’s slow. Let’s run the numbers…. (June 2014)
I started travel writing because I was young and liked to travel and figured if I could make money while doing so then my parents would ease up on the whole get-a-real-job thing.
And travel writing appealed to me because it was wide open. I could write about people, food, architecture, history or whatever else caught my interest depending on where I was. I just had to tie everything together with a sense of place.
I started off selling articles to newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Dallas Times Herald, then wrote my first story for the New York Times in 1989. It was about an obscure rare book library in Philadelphia because of course the New York Times would publish a story about an obscure rare book library. For a few years, I also contributed regular travel pieces to The Atlantic, including stories about Iceland, Barbados, and Guatemala. I’ve also written travel pieces for airline magazines and other glossies.
For five years, I compiled Frommer’s travel guides, covering northeastern North America from Vermont to Newfoundland. With my first advance, I bought a 1985 VW camper and lived out of that as a mobile office for a couple of months each summer. That was pretty great, although having to talk to people who own and operate country inns wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped.
The Atlantic BACK TO THE FUTURE. The monorail was a half-century ahead of its time. It’s been mired there ever since. (Dec 2005)
The Atlantic GREETINGS FROM AIRWORLD! A tour of America without ever leaving the airport - six days, five airports, 106 hours of layover-as-vacation. (July/Aug 2006)
New York Times A USER'S MANUAL TO SEAT 21C Congratulations on selecting Seat 21C. This manual is intended to familiarize you with the many options available to you. (Jan. 3, 2008)
New York Times BIDDING THE INTERSTATE GOODBYE
Four weeks, 7,052 miles, 23 states, one Volkswagen camper. Taking a road trip that bypasses "Supersize" America. (July 14, 2002)
The Atlantic WENI, WIDI, WIKI When Yelp had just 1.7 million reviews, (vs. more than 175 million+ today), I set out to see if crowd-sourced travel information was reliable. (May 2008)
The Atlantic. THE OLD MAN AND THE DAIQUIRI. In search of Hemingway’s tipple of choice in Old Havana. (Oct 2005)
The New York Times PADDLING FROM INN TO INN. Cobbling together a four-day kayak trip along Maine’s rocky coast, but without sleeping on roots and rocks. (July 13, 1997)