Sam is a writer and editor based in New York. He writes about comics regularly for The New York Times Book Review and occasionally for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, about politics for Spencer Ackerman’s FOREVER WARS, where he is editor, and publishes short fiction through the Flaming Hydra collective newsletter. He is working on a book about the history of DC Comics for HarperOne with his friend Sean Howe. He was editor at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where he oversaw print and website publication of the Tow Center’s research reports, journalistic output through the Columbia Journalism Review, and digital tools, from 2018 through 2020. Before that, he covered technology and business for The Guardian, politics for Talking Points Memo, and the New York entertainment business for Variety. In 2017, he worked as political consultant for Comedy Central’s The President Show. That year at Talking Points Memo, he broke the news that Donald Trump was exploring a hotel project in Moscow during his 2016 presidential campaign. His reporting has been cited by the House Oversight Committee and in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and his essay about Disney World, No Matter How Your Heart Is Grieving, was selected by Slate as one of the best pieces published by online literary magazine The Toast. He holds a fellowship from The O’Neill Critics Institute and an MFA in Dramaturgy from the Columbia School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son and their cat.
Selected work:
“The Comic-Strip Writer Who Became a Legend” | The New Yorker
“The Passion of the Cartoonist” | The New York Times Book Review
“No Matter How Your Heart Is Grieving” | The Toast
“Out of Space” (fiction) | Flaming Hydra
“A High-Water Mark in American Mass Culture” | The Atlantic
GRAPHOMANIA 