This blogger is so sick of the content of the news o'the day, no matter the source: from NPR to MSNBC, because it is filled with the images or sounds of the current occupant of the Oval Office. The blogger yells at his loudest — "¡Basta ya!" (Enough already!) at the offending radio or TV set. The essay closes with a smarmy anecdote of grifting suckers out of yuge amounts of money. It is just as real to read the scummy words as it is to see or hear the parasite himself. If this is (fair & balanced) disgust, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
Stephen A. Smith — Figure Of Speech
By Vinson Cunningham
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
"I'm watching ‘60 Minutes’ last night, with the whole Stormy Daniels thing, and the President and all that,” Stephen A. Smith said, early on a Monday near the end of March. He was sitting behind the desk in his small, sparsely furnished office at the Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters of ESPN, eating breakfast—oatmeal with brown sugar and milk, and a green smoothie. The live taping of “First Take,” the morning-time sports-debate show that he co-hosts and that has made him one of the network’s best-paid stars, would begin in a couple of hours. The night before, Daniels, a well-known performer in pornographic films, had sat across from Anderson Cooper and outlined in queasy detail the particulars of her tryst with Donald Trump, and of the hush money she subsequently received from his fixer, Michael Cohen. “And all I’m thinking about,” Smith continued, “is, Is he getting impeached? Really? Is anybody being arrested? Really?! So why are we doing this? That’s really my attitude. I’m watching, and they’re talking about”—here he affected a mocking, singsong parody of an over-earnest political pundit—“ ‘Well, the lawyer paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and basically because of that you did it on behalf of the President and it can be perceived as a campaign contribution, and you exceeded the limit.’ And I’m sitting there, like, ‘So, let me get this straight. In this day and age, somebody tried to wield influence, paid off somebody, and he’s already in office, and you think that you’re gonna get him out of there? Good luck with that.’ That’s how I deduce things.”
I got the impression that, under other circumstances, Smith would have happily continued to narrate his underwhelmed response to the blooming national scandal for the rest of breakfast. The hallmark of his presence on TV and radio—where, every weekday, beginning just an hour after “First Take” goes off air, he hosts the two-hour “Stephen A. Smith Show” —is his ability not only to talk but to editorialize, at length, and more or less extemporaneously, about any topic tossed his way, like a juggler whose every bauble is an item of current events. Already that morning, as we walked from a “First Take” production meeting to the ESPN cafeteria, and then to his office, he’d offered his thoughts on the perils of the sedentary life (“Blood clots and all of that stuff. That’s how that develops—always sitting, never stand, never walk, never run”); the hierarchy among big-screen leading men (“I happen to love Will Smith. I happen to love Ed Norton. I happen to love my brother Jamie Foxx, who I think is the most talented and versatile talent in all of Hollywood. I love these guys, but there’s only one Denzel”); and the relative benefits of various milks (“I used to think the almond milk was best, but then somebody told me—a trainer told me—there’s too much estrogen up in there. In the almond milk. That’s right.” It’s not right. “You don’t wanna walk around with man-boobs if you don’t have to. I got away from that”). Given time, he might have explicated the angles of the Stormy Daniels affair the way that he and his daily “First Take” debate partner, Max Kellerman, size up an NFL coach’s press conference or the latest playoff performance by LeBron James.
But he had alighted on the tawdry intrigue of the moment only to illustrate a larger point, about how audiences these days approach news media, whether it concerns sports or politics or, as seems to be the case more and more often, both at once. “You watch to just hear perspectives,” he said. “Back in the day, you watched to learn the news. Now you can get the news in five minutes. Between your smartphones and everything else—you’ve always got the news. So you’re interested in watching different perspectives, hearing what people have to say, what their opinions are, and why. And sort of gauging whether or not they’re right or wrong. People think they know. They’re not interested in learning. They’re interested in hearing whether or not your perspective is aligned with theirs. If so, why, and if not, why not? That used to be just sports. Now it’s everywhere.
“The job,” he said, looking thrilled to have it, “is to be enough of a personality that they want to know what you think.”
Smith, who turned fifty last year, is tall and lanky, with negligible shoulders; in person, the great majority of his body seems supplementary, like the long stem of a small-bowled glass that delicately holds his head. The upper part of his back stoops slightly, pushing his face forward into the space between himself and the camera, an instrument that has never daunted him, he says, not even the very first time he appeared on air. He saw the red light and popped into action, like Jordan after the whistle. His eyes are deep-set and uncommonly circular; when he stretches them into surprise—often in accompaniment of a spiked tetrasyllable like “ri-di-cu-lous,” or “pre-pos-ter-ous,” or “Max Kel-ler-man”—they are perfect O’s. His hairline sits ever farther back from his squirming eyebrows, and his shifting expanse of forehead signals emotions before they make their way out of his mouth. It clenches into a furious rictus, or gathers itself into three befuddled folds as his brows jolt upward, or, at moments of deepest disgust, smooths out entirely, into a kind of placid pre-irritation, like a calm body of water, at the bottom of which there is a mine, ready to detonate.
All of this is secondary, though, to Smith’s voice, and its four distinct registers. There’s the even second tenor, which he uses to convey information, or to drily recapitulate somebody else’s point before chopping it down. Slightly higher, pitchwise, is the lilting whine that he deploys for derision. Above these is a falsetto, which punctuates his many raptures of disbelief: “Really?!” “WHAT ?!?!” “No!!!!! ” Finally, there is the scream. Early in his TV career, Smith got the nickname Screamin’ A. (His middle name is Anthony.) When the other voices are not enough, Smith pulls a hoarse yell from somewhere near his sternum and lathers out his judgment. But, over the years, he has discovered that this register must be held in check. “I had to learn how to pull back sometimes,” he told me.
After breakfast, I followed Smith across campus to the studio where “First Take” is recorded. ESPN has been headquartered in Bristol since its early days, in the late seventies, because its two founders lived in Connecticut and real estate was cheap there. Its first broadcast aired on September 7, 1979: an episode of its flagship news program, “SportsCenter.” With funding from Getty Oil, the fledgling network purchased the rights to various college sporting events, then the NFL draft. In 1984, ABC bought Getty’s stake in ESPN, and sold twenty per cent of the company to Nabisco, which sold its shares to the Hearst Corporation; in 1996, ABC’s stake became the property of the Walt Disney Company. As ESPN has grown from a basic-cable novelty to a corporate-media behemoth, its campus has likewise expanded, if not quite kept pace—these days, it looks like a dismal liberal-arts college, sans quad. The buildings that house the network’s studios, cafeterias, and offices are squat, with red brick façades interrupted by large windows. Shuttle vans carry visitors and employees from one spot to the next.
When we reached the studio, Smith took a final sip of his smoothie, received a light dusting of makeup, and took a seat at a bean-shaped desk, across from the “First Take” moderator, Molly Qerim. (Kellerman was taping from Los Angeles.) Qerim bantered with the crew as they cranked levers and established their shots. Smith maintained an almost perfect stillness, preserving energy for his precious moments on the air. The Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Michael Bennett had recently been indicted, in Houston, for allegedly injuring an elderly paraplegic woman in the moments after his brother’s team, the New England Patriots, won the Super Bowl, in 2017. (Bennett was accused of pushing the woman as he made his way onto the field. His lawyer has said he “just flat-out didn’t do it.”) Smith explained, once the cameras were rolling, that he was horrified by the accusation, and, especially, by the sensational and possibly racialized way that Houston’s police chief had described Bennett’s actions. Then, just as he reached the height of a defense of Bennett’s character, he stopped.
“Put this camera on me, please,” he said, annoyance swimming across his face. He made a turning motion with his fingers, as if attempting to swivel the lens himself. “Because it is very important that I say this!”
“First Take” began life in 2003, under the name “Cold Pizza,” ESPN’s attempt at a sports-world version of “Good Morning America.” The name was changed in 2007; a few years later, the network’s ratings analysis revealed that viewership spiked during the show’s intermittent debate segments, featuring the columnists Skip Bayless and Woody Paige. So, in 2011, the show’s other features were dropped, and it became two hours of debate. Smith began making guest appearances that year. In 2012, he joined Bayless on the show full time.
The format is simple: a moderator, customarily female, lobs a question to the two stars of the show (always male, so far, save for days when somebody is sick or on vacation). The men all but invariably offer opposing opinions, then duke it out, absent any real hope of persuasion, for two or three minutes, until the next commercial break. New segment, new topic. Repeat as needed until two hours are spent. It’s a feat of transformation: the solid but unprocessed stuff of sports—movement and minute coördination, thousands of barely conscious acts of choice—becomes pure discourse. In this way, the show dramatizes one of the mercies of following sports. Almost nightly, we gain access to a fresh set of low-stakes facts over which to tussle, in replacement, if not outright avoidance, of weightier matters. On “First Take,” as in barbershops across Harlem and bars all over Chicago, games elicit emotional responses incommensurate with their importance. Eyes bulge. Hands flail. Whole modes of comportment and personal ethics come under question.
Bayless is an Oklahoma native who spent most of his pre-television career in Texas. He and Smith first met, in 1999, at an NBA game; a few years later, they filmed a pilot for Fox Sports Net titled “Sports in Black and White,” which never aired. On “First Take,” they often invoked individual athletes as metonyms for the broader values and varieties of excellence that animated their enjoyment of sports. Two athletes came up with special frequency: the NBA superstar LeBron James, who, like Smith, is black, and the former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow, who, like Bayless, is white. For Bayless, Tebow represented all-American wholesomeness and stoutness of heart, and also clutch performance. For Smith, Tebow was a dud—a nice and commendably pious dud, but a dud all the same—who could barely throw a spiral and would never make a lasting NFL starter. (Smith was right about this.) Conversely, for Smith, James was nearly unimpeachable, “the league MVP.” Bayless anathematized James as a diva who was tough when trouncing inferior competition but “soft” when the lights were brightest. (Bayless was wrong about this.)
The contours of these disagreements contributed to an impression that “First Take” was designed, at least in part, to exploit the often unspoken racial fissures that help create some of sports’ most stubborn archetypes: the “blue collar” white player who makes up in grit what he lacks in physical ability, and the flashy wide receiver or small forward who cares more about his highlights than about the fortunes of his team. (Women’s sports, save when Serena Williams is competing in a major tournament, are rarely fodder for this kind of TV.) The show subtly situates sports debate as a black-American cultural form: rappers are among the most frequent guests, and an original track by Wale has been its theme song since shortly after Smith became one of its stars. Smith and Bayless had obvious affection for one another, and their politics did not map perfectly onto a standard spectrum of left and right. (Smith says that he is an independent; Bayless describes himself as “apolitical.”) But they nonetheless served as stand-ins for a national divide.
In 2016, Bayless left ESPN, and signed a contract with Fox Sports 1 [FS1], which will pay him between twenty-five and thirty million dollars over four years. Fox built a new debate show around Bayless, pairing him with another black co-host, the former wide receiver Shannon Sharpe. ESPN replaced him, on “First Take,” with Kellerman. Smith told me that he and Bayless “woke up every morning with totally opposite ideas,” whereas he and Kellerman, who are closer in age and both grew up in the New York area, have to find different grooves along which to conduct their debates. Kellerman, for his part, casts his difference with Smith in terms of Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy between foxes—nimble empirical machines who address each problem as it comes—and hedgehogs, who strain their understanding of the world through grand interpretive frameworks. “Stephen A. is very much a hedgehog,” Kellerman said. (Smith has teasingly called Kellerman “Max Webster,” as in the dictionary.) “I think he has a more religious outlook than I do,” he continued. “If you believe in an undisprovable hypothesis, because that’s how you feel, there’s nothing I can say or do to change your mind. So he just expresses his point of view—and he truly does not care what you think. I also say what’s on my mind, but the difference is, I am trying to convince you of what I think.” He added, referencing Bayless, “It’s no longer a show between two religious points of view. Now it’s a contest between a religious and a secular point of view.”
The result is a strange reversal of the show’s previous iteration. Kellerman is more likely than Smith to wholeheartedly defend the former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality, for instance—and Smith has become quicker to criticize LeBron James. After James and his Cleveland Cavaliers were swept by the Golden State Warriors in the NBA finals, James revealed that he had been playing with an injured hand; Smith, in a “First Take” segment, said, “The word that comes to my mind is insecure,” adding that James has an “arguably addictive appetite to try and control the narrative.” But Smith maintains that his attitude toward James only seems different because he’s no longer arguing with Bayless. “Now that Bayless is gone, all I hear is everyone raving about LeBron,” he said. “I’m surprised everyone hasn’t brought him flowers.” He added, “I’ve stepped up my criticism because I never thought I was being critical—I was being factual.”
Viewers sometimes wonder whether Smith sincerely holds the opinions he spouts on air. He does, but he also knows the value of conflict for the purposes of television. “When the Presidential debates are on, I’ll watch that like it’s the Super Bowl,” he told me. “I actually thoroughly enjoy that. I always have. It wasn’t just when Trump was debating sixteen Republican candidates. It was also when Al Gore was going up against Bush, or when Kerry was going up against Bush—and annihilated Bush in one of those debates—or Clinton going up against H.W. You know, Reagan and Mondale . . . I mean, it’s crazy! I’ve watched Presidential debates since I was a teen, and I love it.”
Another television favorite of Smith’s since childhood is the long-running soap opera “General Hospital.” Since 2016, he has had a recurring role on the show: Brick, a surveillance expert who works for the show’s leading man, Sonny Corinthos. (He had a cameo on the show, in 2007, as a TV reporter, which lasted, he said, “ten seconds.”) The gig is an exercise in pure wish fulfillment—when Smith talks about it, he almost giggles. The ever-churning arcs of soap operas also provide Smith yet another analogy for his job. Once, he told me, Shaquille O’Neal confronted him about a particularly tough bit of criticism. “I saw that shit you wrote,” the big man said. “But damn, here I am about to win a championship.” Smith’s rejoinder was simple. “Shaq, I’m a ‘General Hospital’ fan,” he said. “Did you know that? And guess what—Sonny Corinthos is gonna live. Did you know that? Victor Newman”—a character from “The Young and the Restless”—“just fell down a flight of stairs and he’s in a coma. Did you know he’s gonna live? Did you know that? The point is: the story still has to be told.”
Smith attributes his love of “General Hospital” to the time he spent watching it with his four older sisters, in Hollis, Queens, where he grew up. Smith’s parents were both originally from St. Thomas. His father, who had been a baseball star back home, managed a hardware store; his mother was a nurse. Although his father still lives in Smith’s childhood home, along with one of Smith’s sisters, Smith does not publicly discuss their relationship. “I don’t talk much about him because my father and I are not close,” he told me. “And I don’t go into detail about it out of respect for my mother. I’ll leave it at that.” Smith’s mother, who died last June, was a kind of loving drill sergeant, whose simple hope for her son was that he not “be a knucklehead.” When Smith expressed indifference toward attending college, she enrolled him in the Thomas A. Edison vocational high school, in order to learn electrical installation. The prospect scared him toward college: he knew that that wasn’t what he wanted.
The other spur toward college was basketball. Smith spent much of his youth at the playground near his home, shooting hoops. It had no working lights, so Smith, during evenings after school, would put up shot after shot in the dark. His mother worried about “street dudes”—drug dealers, gang members—but eventually recognized that they looked out for her son. “I was not to be touched,” Smith said. “They knew I had a future.”
Smith briefly attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York, and then earned a basketball scholarship to Winston-Salem State University, where he began to write sports columns for the student paper. He also hosted a late-night R&B radio show called “Tender Moments.” He likes to tell the story of writing a column insisting that his own coach, Clarence [Big House] Gaines, needed to retire. Smith always notes that he told Gaines about the piece ahead of time, and that Gaines, who died in 2005, had no problem with it. But the chancellor, Smith says, thought he should be expelled. (The chancellor, Cleon Thompson, said that he does not recall the incident.)
The best way to learn about the rest of Smith’s pre-ESPN career is to make him angry. Last year, after a round of ESPN layoffs, the writer Jeff Pearlman, previously of Sports Illustrated, and the author of several books, complained, in a blog post, that the company had let go several respected reporters but held on to Smith. Pearlman contended that Smith, having discovered that reporting didn’t pay, “surrendered his integrity card and went full-blown Ringling Bros.” The comment continues to rankle Smith, who views his career as an exercise in perfectly incremental meritocracy. “You defined for us what success is,” Smith said, when I brought up the matter. (By “you,” I took him to mean white people, though Smith said, later, that he was referring to “the system.”) “And I walked through it. Sometimes I crawled through it. But I made it through.”
As Smith reflected on Pearlman’s critique, he worked himself into a state of excitement not unlike the ones he performs on camera. “Who the hell are you to say something like that? Were you a beat writer?” Pearlman was a food and fashion writer for the Tennessean before going to Sports Illustrated, where he covered baseball for seven years. “I’ve got nothing but respect—you’re a best-selling author, I get that—but you weren’t on the beat. You didn’t break stories like I broke stories. You didn’t grind and pound this pavement.” He went on, “You want to put résumés up against one another, name the time and place, and I. Will. Show. Up.
“Winston-Salem Chronicle. Winston-Salem Journal. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Back to the Winston-Salem Journal. New York Daily News—I started out covering homicide. Covered homicide for four months, because the sports department at the Daily News had gone away because of the strike. After doing that for four months, I was a high-school-sports writer. I wrote one of the biggest stories in the history of high-school sports, when Karlton Hines got smoked—got killed—somebody shot him, in broad daylight, two in the afternoon, and his mom couldn’t accept the fact that her son was dealing drugs. I got into her home, I interviewed her, I interviewed her family, she gave me pictures of him in the casket. I did these things!”
Smith next went to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covered high-school sports, then college sports, and then the pros—and, finally, became a general sports columnist, a position that not many African-American writers have attained. “The NBA lockout in 1998, 1999, I’m breaking stories all over the place, so much so that everybody on TV was calling for me to come on, because nobody in television had the info. And that got me onto CNN/SI, which brought me on as an NBA analyst on television. Then transitioned to Fox Sports, which ultimately led to ESPN.”
The Inquirer, Smith said, wanted him to keep writing as his profile grew. And so he wrote columns “while hosting my own radio show, while hosting a national television show. Who does that? And I am the guy that you wanna talk about? That’s insulting. It’s a sticking point for me. Yes, I’m a personality. I accept that. OK? I understand it. But I’m a personality with credentials.”
The moment, in 2005, when Smith became a triple threat—columnist, radio host, TV host—was a kind of apotheosis. Profiles in Sports Illustrated and the Times followed. (“People might come back because they hate him,” an ESPN executive said to SI, of Smith’s ratings. “The bottom line is, they come back.”) But it proved difficult to sustain. In 2007, the Inquirer bumped him down to general-assignment reporter. The paper fired him the following year. An arbitrator later ruled that the firing was “unjust,” and Smith was reinstated as a columnist, in 2010. He left the paper for good less than a year later.
Meanwhile, ESPN declined to renew his contract. “There were people who had gotten quite uncomfortable with the level, and the intensity, of his brand, so to speak,” James Andrew Miller, who cowrote, with Tom Shales, the oral history Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN (2011), told me. “It was very bombastic and outspoken.” According to Miller, Smith’s style irritated traditionalists within the company, who favored the relatively buttoned-up presentation of “SportsCenter.” Smith did a brief stint with Fox, before a separate ESPN faction mounted a successful campaign to bring him back into the fold. “Stephen is not a cheap date,” Miller said. “But if he’s on five times a week, and you can deliver eyeballs in the morning, it’s a good deal for you.”
Smith told me that when he realized, in 2009, that his contract wouldn’t be renewed, he moped at home for about thirty-six hours. Then he talked to his mother. “But what did you do?” she asked him. The question, he says, jolted him out of his funk, and got him thinking about his attitude. He’d taken slights personally, sometimes attributing to racial bias matters better explained by the simple dollar. From now on, wherever he landed, he’d make himself a total asset—so undeniably helpful that reward would have to follow.
That attitude has served him well in the years since his return to the network, which have been increasingly rocky ones for ESPN. Amid a long period of layoffs, fuelled, in part, by cord cutting—younger viewers opting for streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, delivered via Roku or Apple TV—Smith and “First Take” have thrived. Since Trump’s election, ESPN has become the occasional target of conservatives, who accuse it of being in the bag for cultural progressivism, a kind of sporty sibling to MSNBC. Last September, Jemele Hill, who, along with Michael Smith, was hosting the six-o’clock edition of “SportsCenter,” irked the current Administration, and its fans, when she described Trump as a “white supremacist” on Twitter. A few months later, she was off the show. “ESPN is saying two things,” Miller told me. “First, it’s: be distinctive. But then, when Michael and Jemele are really themselves, the message is: not that distinctive.”
ESPN operates eight cable networks; until last year, “First Take” aired on its second-most-watched channel, ESPN2. The show now airs on ESPN’s primary cable network, which has far more viewers, and its ratings are stronger than ever. And the show has an afterlife online: Smith’s “First Take” segments are posted on YouTube when the broadcast is done. As declining cable subscriptions make “SportsCenter” anchors less visible, Smith has become ESPN’s most recognizable face—and that has won him more leeway than he was afforded a decade ago. In 2014, when the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was suspended by the N.F.L. for domestic abuse, Smith seemed to suggest, on “First Take,” that some responsibility for the episode lay with Rice’s wife. “Let’s make sure we don’t do anything to provoke wrong actions,” he said. (Although video footage later emerged of Rice punching his wife in the face and head, a judge dismissed a charge of aggravated assault after Rice paid a small fine and completed anger-management counselling.) Several of Smith’s colleagues registered their anger about the remarks; some commentators outside the company called for his firing. Smith delivered an on-air apology, and was suspended by the network for a week. (Smith remains adamant that the original comments were taken out of context. “I was raised by five women,” he said. “I would never hit a woman, I would never condone domestic violence, period.”)
In March, I went to see Smith speak in a brightly lit gymnasium at the College of New Jersey. The seats were filled with students, mostly male, in sweats and shorts and shapeless tees; a tall flight of bleachers was pulled out to accommodate later arrivals. Smith bounded onto the stage to applause, and some jokey shouting of his name. He paced as he spoke, slapping his hands together at irregular intervals, like a coach at halftime. The meat of the talk—which, his manager, Rushion McDonald, told me, forms the basis of a forthcoming book—was about succeeding in one’s job. “I go to work every day with two missions,” Smith said. “Two! No. 1: how can I make my bosses more money? And No. 2: how can I get some of it?”
I thought of these missions on the last night Smith and I met. We were having dinner at a restaurant on a high floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, in Manhattan, and we had been speaking about Smith’s ambitions. He told me that he could see himself at the helm of a late-night show, or even behind the “SportsCenter” desk. (A few weeks later, he hosted special episodes of “SportsCenter” before each weekday game of the NBA finals—which went well, he thought, though it was disappointing that the series was so short.) He said that he was very proud of “First Take” and the radio show. “But if anybody thinks for one second that that’s all I wanna do, they don’t know me,” he said. “They don’t know me at all. They haven’t done their homework.”
I asked Smith what else, besides the brief departure from ESPN, had helped shape his ideas about the business of himself.
“I need you to brace yourself,” he said. “What I’m about to tell you is gonna blow you away. And I promise you, it will be in your article. Book it: what I’m about to tell you right now. And I wasn’t going to tell you unless you asked. The defining moment in terms of this epiphany, where it elevated to another level, was courtesy of a man now known as the President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald Trump.”
Trump was a guest on “Quite Frankly,” which aired from 2005 to 2007. “And, at one point—I don’t think this was an on-air segment—he said, ‘Stephen, when you go to a bank and you borrow three million dollars, and you can’t pay it back, you’ve got a problem. But when you go to a bank and you borrow three hundred million dollars, and you can’t pay it back, we’ve got a problem.’ ” (A variation of this maxim is often attributed to J. Paul Getty, whose company, coincidentally, provided the early backing for ESPN.) “He said, ‘The moral of the story is, The more they invest in you the more they must insure your success. If you come cheap, you’re expendable. But, if you’re expensive, you’re valued. Don’t ever forget that.’ That’s what he told me. I never forgot it. Little did I know he would become the President.
“I’m incredibly disappointed in him behaviorally,” he quickly added. “But that’s it. I don’t get into the politics.” # # #
[Vinson Cunningham joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. His writing on books, art, and culture has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Awl, the Fader, and McSweeney’s. He received a BA (English) from CUNY-Hunter College (NY).]
Copyright © 2016 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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