This podcast was so much fun, I wondered whether the final cut would include anything besides hosts Eric Beetner, S.W. Lauden and I laughing…

… This is where I will be reading Saturday at 12:45, @PDXArtMuseum, as part of #PDXBookFest. They placed me next to the painting at left (“Mother and Child”). We saw yesterday, during a little recon, what was on the right…

The Elizabeth Warren Native American imbroglio, new from me at Reason…

I loved doing the Stacks podcast (twice!) more than I can say. This week, Traci and I talk about John Carreyrou’s triumphant “Bad Blood,” my favorite nonfiction book of the year. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Need (and will!) get a better about posting. Here is a Reason piece from late August, about Argento, Laura Albert, Rose McGowan, Tony Bourdain, and the #MeToo climate du jour, which my editor smartly sub-heded, "A tale of fame, fallacy, and the perils of good intentions."

Few things I enjoy more than spending time with the brilliant/badass people from Reason, and super-stoked to have had the chance to podcast with Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, about “To the Bridge," the state of journalism, and why “the tit pic is not the problem.”

Listen to the whole thing here

Thank you, Bustle, and for the good company

"Friends of Amanda, including college classmate Tiffany Gray, were forced in the aftermath to reconcile the vivacious young mother they had known with the woman who committed an act so monstrous as to be nearly inconceivable…”

"An emotionally honest, meticulous examination of a confluence of circumstances that culminated in a deadly act, and the complicity of our own city and culture in its aftermath."

I am privileged to be in-conversation on May 17 with Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body, a Murder and a Memoir. We will be at Powell's Books on Hawthorne at 7:30pm, details here. 

"After work, I go to a Ukrainian bar in the East Village, where the drinks are served in small water glasses by an unsmiling Ukrainian bartender who looks as though he might enjoy smashing in the faces of his new scrawny art school customers." (From, “The Audience and the Camera.”)

“How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable?”

My review of Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington's extraordinary new book  on judicial and racial injustice in Mississippi, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. A clip...

You will know her story--the beating, the lip, her mother, how Wilhelm Brasse was able to bring her to us. I wanted to keep her story going... 

That a story as charged as a mother killing her children might be told with balance; that we might anti-sensationalize it, is my best hope. I believe Amy Frazier and KOIN 6 have done so here, and for this, they have my sincere gratitude

Kelsey and Remy Bennett (known in our house as "the Power Sisters") have produced an astonishing series of short documentaries, UNDER HER SKIN. Premiering today on i-D, a 15-minute film about my daughter Tafv Sampson," a personal portrait of creativity and America's cultural landscape."

"I loved Tim deeply when we were a couple, but our day-to-day lives had been a wreck."

Over on Playboy.com, one of my favorite humans, Remy Bennett, talks "Serial" and "Making a Murderer" and the ethics surrounding our current obsession with true crime as entertainment. She also gives "Destination Gacy" a little love. 

“I think of it every day; I never go over that bridge without thinking about it,” says Pati Gallagher. Her residence is as close as any in Portland to the Sellwood Bridge, her patio a three good strides from the river, and where she was sitting when she heard the children hit the water...