Hello world!

Hi there. This is my first post for True/Slant. Apparently, it’s the first step toward my future as a brand.

Scratch that: It’s actually me second such step. Two years ago, I left a steady job on the unsteady ship that was the Philadelphia Inquirer, in order to write a book about how America became a pampered-pet country. It felt like a good trade, albeit not quite the pure artistic intellectual life I’d imagined. It was more like I was quitting the venerable newspaper in order to go work for Michael Schaffer Literary Venture, Ltd. Salary: About the same, for a while. Benefits: Much worse. Lifestyle: Much better. Opportunities to realize long-term ambitions: Better. Guarantees of short-term security: Worse. It seemed like a good swap at the time. Though my new boss, the bastard, always seemed to know about it when I spent an afternoon in a used bookstore and tried to call it work.

It still feels like a good trade–especially as I watch friends and colleagues, some of whom were so old-school that they’d answer their work phones by saying the name of their publication rather than their own name, realize that they were working for their own personal brand all along, even if they thought they were safe in the arms of some venerable masthead. So: We’re all advertising for ourselves now. And sometimes it’s even kind of fun. All those conversations I used to have about the day’s news or the world’s idiocies with friends or family or whoever was at the water cooler? Now I can have them here and call it work. 

To wit: I’ll be using this space to riff on a bunch of things I’m interested in–not all of them related to the city halls, foreign wars, and national politics I covered as a staff writer at three currently floundering publications. These include: Cities, distant dictatorships, punk rock, Reconstruction, airlines, Canadians, barbecue, trains, bars, expatriates and Afropop. I’ll also try to hit some of the themes I touch in my book, which is kind of one part straight-ahead report on the (still!) booming American pet industry, one part zany tour of contemporary American petmania, and one part meditation about what it all means. (I’ll limit most of my straight-up bragging and salesmanship to my website, where there are links to a variety of positive reviews and bestsellerish hype.) (OK, so there’s was a little salesmanship there, I guess.) (But that’s the last time.) (Maybe.) 

Anyway, enjoy. See you soon.