Who Am I? September 2019

I was born right here in Bergen County at Hackensack Hospital. My dad, Edward, grew up in Paterson. He became a dentist but sadly passed away early on from Parkinson’s. My mom, Barbara, was an art teacher but she too had health issues. I grew up in Hillsdale and attended Pascack Valley High School where I, in a sense, launched my future career by accepting the job of editor of the school newspaper.

After high school I attended Princeton University where I majored in comparative literature. I dropped out of college to travel to Paris where I made a sort of living as a busker in the metro stations and in the train carriages. I also had occasion to interview poets during my Paris sojourn and among those I interviewed was Allen Ginsberg. After Paris I returned to Princeton where I was a ‘stringer’ for both Philly and local
newspapers.

In the early 1980’s I got a job as a cub reporter. Unlike ‘Jimmy Olsen,’ who worked for the “Daily Planet,” which was based in Metropolis, I landed a job with the prestigious Washington Post and stayed on with them for 10 years. I wrote about sports as well as feature stories and was lucky enough to get a 4-year assignment as a Moscow correspondent during the incredibly hopeful era of Gorbachev who initiated his policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika” while I was on assignment in the country. I was only a so-so student of Russian at Princeton but I enrolled in an intensive Russian language course at Middlebury College which greatly improved my language facility and made my reporting job in Moscow that much easier.

After my tenure at the Washington Post I took a job as a reporter for a Conde Nast publication which has a stellar reputation as a literary magazine. It also features international news stories, theater, film, satirical cartoons, popular culture, general entertainment, poems, and criticism. Eventually I became editor of that well-known magazine. I feel the duty of the media is to put pressure on the centers of power and I’d like to point out that the current presidential administration has given us ample material to work with! My long-term goal is to maintain our high standards and sustain our publication as a healthy enterprise whether its future is online, in print, via the airwaves or on podcasts. I’m usually heavily engrossed in my role as editor but somehow I find the time to write books and there are more than a half a dozen of mine in print today.

That’s me in the image below. (1a)Who Am I? (1b)What was the name of my high school newspaper? (2a)What Bob Dylan song did I find most inspirational? (2b)What Russian poet do I revere the most? (3a) For what body of work did I win a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction? (3b)What was the title of the book I wrote about a recent U.S. president? (4a) What periodical do I edit? (4b) Who preceded me at my current job? (5) Not that long ago one of my writers, Ryan Lizza, conducted a controversial interview with “the Mooch” which led to his dismissal from his new job. Who is “the Mooch?” (6a) For relaxation I play electric guitar in my garage. What model guitar do I favor? (6b)What is the most moving gift I have received to date?