How a Reddit Comment Became a Big-Budget Flick
With just a handful of posts about a hypothetical time travel scenario, James Erwin went from web commenter to professional screenwriter. (Wired, April 2012; photo by Sam Comen)
The Death (and Life) of the Philadelphia Weekly and the Philadelphia City Paper
As the internet continues to strangle print, City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly are in a fight to the death to be the city’s go-to alternative weekly — and it just might kill them both. (Philadelphia, June 2012)
Schoolly D is Living the American Dream
The world’s first gangster rapper looks at 50. (Philadelphia, April 2012; photo by Wesley Mann)
Learning to appreciate the very big business, and very particular charms, of peddling discarded metal. (New York Times Magazine, August 2011)
The Chain World videogame was supposed to be a religion, not a holy war. (Wired, August 2011)
Teen mathletes do battle at the Algorithm Olympics, the world’s most prestigious youth coding competition. (Wired, December 2010; photo by Michael Schmelling)
(GQ.com, January 2011)
A profile of Chris Christie, the smash-mouth governor of New Jersey and probable GOP candidate for President. (Philadelphia, December 2010)
A short piece on Tom Sullivan, the Lumber Liquidators CEO who’s building fueling stations for hydrogen cars. (The Atlantic, November 2010)
The tale of a Philadelphia slumlord and the public officials who loved him. (Philadelphia, October 2010) (REACTION TO THIS STORY: 1, 2, 3)
A hunting arcade challenges boundaries with bullets. (Kill Screen, Issue #1, Spring 2010)
Can some out-of-work car-racing engineers save the planet?
(Slate, June 2010)
X Prize Winners Look Weird… With Good Reason
(Wired Autotopia, September 2010)
Tim Tebow Goes for the Conversion
The real meaning of the quarterback’s pro-life Super Bowl ad. (Slate, January 28, 2010)
Was it only last season that Marvin Harrison was still catching TD passes for Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Now, in the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight — many details of which are reported here for the first time — the man who holds the NFL record for most receptions in a season may yet find himself with a permanent record of a different sort. (GQ, February 2010)
MORE MARVIN COVERAGE: This was a wild piece with an equally wild afterlife — as soon as it was posted on GQ.com it started getting picked up by newspapers, blogs, and talk radio. The next day, the newly sworn Philly D.A. said he was taking a fresh look at the Harrison case in large part because of the revelations in the GQ story. Later I typed up some deleted scenes at Deadspin — basically a notebook dump of some stuff I couldn’t fit into the print piece. There’s more coverage of the story and of Marvin at Deadspin, Yahoo Sports, USA Today’s Game On blog, Newsweek’s Tumblr, Pro Football Talk, The New York Times, Philebrity, Mediaite, Technorati Sports, National Football Post, Bleacher Report, OntheDL podcast with Dan Levy, and Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen.
Former Navy admiral and professional hardass Joe Sestak tries to unseat Arlen Specter in the PA Senate race. (Philadelphia, January 2010)
For half a century, the Republican Party has been a joke in Philadelphia. But now a few upstarts have a radical idea: Let’s try to get Republican candidates elected! (Philadelphia, October 2009)
Does God Have a Tim Tebow Complex?
A profile of Tim Tebow from when he was still a Florida Gator. (GQ, September 2009)
The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls
Jason Rohrer’s solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love. (Esquire, December 2008; Spanish translation in Etiqueta Negra, October 2009)
Over the course of a century, Wolf Block grew into one of Philadelphia’s most famous law firms. So what caused its sudden collapse in March? (Philadelphia, June 2009)
Profile of vaccine advocate Dr. Paul Offit. (Philadelphia, June 2009)
A road trip across the Eastern Bloc with dozens of mustachioed Hungarians, a few jolly Czechs, two Slovenians, four Russians, three gung-ho dudes from the U.S. Department of Energy, and enough highly enriched uranium to destroy a city. (The Penn Stater, January/February 2009)
The strange allure of making your own fonts (Slate, June 2008)
As Seen on YouTube (and Pretty Much Only on YouTube)
Profile of Vova Galchenko, the best young juggler in the world. (NY Times Play magazine, June 2008)
Jerry Blavat Finds the Fountain of Youth
The last doo-wop deejay. (Philadelphia, May 2008)
The fight to eradicate tuberculosis. (Esquire, December 2007)
Among the super-gluttons, on the front lines of competitive eating. (The Atlantic, May 2006)
The Great Gusto of Jimmy Binns
Profile of the most flamboyant lawyer in boxing. (Philadelphia, February 2006)
Profile of Brian Tierney, the self-made adman who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News. (Philadelphia, April 2007)
The story of a gay man’s attempt to convert himself. (Philadelphia, October 2004)
