My review of Peter Temple’s “The Broken Shore” appeared in Salon.com’s “Summer Reads” for 2007.


I thought it was a pretty gripping thriller. And the writing was just beautiful — Temple really is a master of the English language.You can read my review here. And you can purchase “The Broken Shore” from Amazon.com by clicking on the thumbnail of the book’s cover on the right.

And, as always, here’s a pdf of my review:

“The Broken Shore”

By Peter Temple

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25

It may be summertime in America, but it’s winter down under. In Peter Temple’s “The Broken Shore,” big-city detective Joe Cashin returns to his hometown on the South Australian coast to recover from a run-in with a felon that nearly claimed his life. He busies himself by playing with his dogs, taking walks in the country, and restoring the house his grandfather ruined when he blew himself up on the premises. This could be a novel in itself, with Cashin confronting the skeletons — literally — in his closet. But when a local millionaire is brutally assaulted and the three aboriginal youths accused of the crime die in quick succession, he is pulled back into the sleuthing biz.

Read The Full Story…

Don Imus’ getting kicked off the air, ironically, got me one of my first major(ish) assignments at Salon.com. My NYU classmate Thomas Rogers and I — Salon being a hothouse for NYU grads — put together a roundtable on “Safe Speech” featuring some of the site’s favorite personalities.

It took a LONG TIME. To begin with, it was kind of last minute. To make matters worse, any actor/ singer/ writer/ blogger/ New York City resident of note has an agent. Having to go through middlemen took up the better part of 2 days.

The final panel included Floyd Abrams, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, Greg Gutfield, Brian Lehrer, Michael Musto, Scott Simon and comedienne Sandra Tsing Loh.

But we eventually got something together. You can see it here.

Or download a pdf version here:

When I joined Salon.com in 2007 I was working with entertainment editor Scott Lamb (now at BuzzFeed). We’d get up early every morning to put together The Fix. The Fix was Salon’s daily pop-culture blog. It was meant for readers who were interested in pop culture, but didn’t have much time to surf the Web. It was Salon’s most popular feature and accounted for the bulk of the site’s traffic. It was RSS enabled and allowed readers to join an email listing that would forward the web page, as is, to their inboxes. Our goal was to give a reader, within about 10 minutes, a comprehensive and enjoyable update on the media and entertainment industries.

You can check out some examples of The Fix here: