I am an investigator, a critic, a scholar, a writer.
My next book is a look into a riveting, understudied historical figure—my grandfather—as well as a portrait of a shifting America. It is to be published by Pantheon Books in February 2025.
My writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and I’m often interviewed in international and national media, including on NPR, MSNBC, and CNN. My first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, won an Editor’s Choice Award from The American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and white nationalism in contemporary US life.
Recently, I was the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in Nonfiction Literature at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University (2023-2024). And I taught at Princeton University, as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies (2023).
I am grateful for the support that my work has received at important junctures over the years, from places including the Bellagio Center, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities program at NYPL, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the New-York Historical Society.
Thank you for stopping by.