I write here much less than I used to, especially the first several years of this blog, when I posted something new M-F and included original interviews most weeks. That isn't feasible anymore on a lot of levels (business, personal), nor does it feel very current, but this site began as a repository for my work and that's what it shall remain, with occasional updates for passers-by.  

I do have this other newsletter project I'm working on. How is it different frm this site? Well, for one important big thing, it's earning me money--not a gigantic amount but an amount that makes it worth it. This site has gotten me a lot of tangential work but aside from an ad network that went defunct and a couple sponsored posts I didn't make money from this site. So that makes it worth the time and effort.  

But paradoxically I don't want everyone to read the newsletter. It's not for everyone. The subject matter isn't going to be interesting to everyone and the tone and point of view are not going to be to everyone's taste. It's opt-in. This is very different from the time I had my husband make the world's worst Paris Hilton parody and Gawker picked it up and I watched with excitement and amazement as my traffic numbers ran up.  

On to non-newsletter writing: I wrote this piece for Vice called  I'm Not a Child Molester: I Just Play One On TV. I came up with that headline and I think it's pretty self-explanatory. I honestly yearned for this story to be killed at times because my editor pushed me to explore pedophilia and society/culture in a way I didn't intend to at first and it just made me feel very strange to research that, even though my research was on the academic and cultural side (there was a story on actual perpetrators of child sexual assault in the  New York Times  this weekend that made me sick and so sad for the reporters who did the important work.) The piece grew as we pursued other question and I was like "Does this thing we're exploring make sense?"  

But the piece got born. I did my best to marry pop culture with real culture and did some pretty interesting interviews along the way (character Dylan Baker was a joy to speak with; he misses  Philip Seymour Hoffman a lot). I was worried about being flamed for somehow enabling child sexual assault but so far people seemed to see the question I was trying to answer. My old friend Lindsay even referred to the piece as "longform" and I can't tell you how exciting that is for me. I always wanted to be a longform writer when I grew up.