writing

(Selected, as of May 2024)

books:

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture (with Merry I. White) (University of California Press, 2023) Translations into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese in progress. Audiobook (narrated by the author) and ebook available.

Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food, (University of California Press, 2019). Translated into Chinese and Korean. Longlisted for the Art of Eating Best Book of the Year, 2020. Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook (narrated by the author), and ebook.

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt, (University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2016). Available in hardcover and paperback.

Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College, (Williamstown, MA: Williams College/UPNE, 2013)

essays:

“Twilight Time” (on William Gibson and Tom Maddox’s episode of The X-Files, “Killswitch,” Studies in the Fantastic, May 5th, 2024

“Don’t Look Down: The History of the Future of Food,” Grow, 11.3.2022

“There Are Two Kinds of People,” Dilettante Army, Summer 2022

“On Missing Cafes,” Standart Issue 24, Fall 2021.

“When These Old Clothes Shall Go To War,” Valet, No.2, Summer 2021.

“Against Public Philosophy,” Aeon, 5.20.21

“The Punning of Reason,” Times Literary Supplement, 12.18.20

“Designing a New Future for Flesh: The Case for the Carnal Skeuomorph,” Mold Magazine, 2.18.2020

“The Distance from Our Food,” The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 21 No. 3 (Fall, 2019)

“Origin Story” and “Return to Origin,” Standart, Issues 16 & 17, Fall & Winter 2019

“Animal, Vegetable, or Both? Making Sense of the Scythian Lamb.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Monday, August 05, 2019

“Biotech Cockaigne of the Vegan Hopeful,” The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 21 No. 1 (Spring, 2019). Partially excerpted from Meat Planet

“Bruise,” The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Jan., 2019

“Blue Period: Blue Bottle and James Freeman at 16 Years,” Standart, December 2018

“On Reading Jonathan Gold,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov., 2018. Selected for the 2019 Best American Food Writing by editors Silvia Gonzalez Killingsworth and Samin Nosrat.

“Intellectuals are Ordinary,” The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 2018)

“The Call to Theory,” The Revealer, July 2017

“Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, July, 2016

“Space Jew, or, Walter Benjamin Among the Stars,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, Feb, 2016

“Meat For Spaceship Earth?” Semicopia.com, Winter 2016

“Writing in Cafes: a Personal History,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept, 2015

“A Precise Imprecision,” re-form (medium.com), April, 2015.

“The In Vitro Meat Cookbook: Recipes as Design Fiction,” re-form (medium.com), 2014

“Economy, Gastronomy, and the Guilt of the Fancy Meal,” Gastronomica, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 55-59

“Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension,” Gastronomica, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 57-60

“Starbucks and Rootless Cosmopolitanism,” Gastronomica, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 71-75

“East of Eden: Sin and Redemption at the Whole Foods Market,” Gastronomica, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 87-90

academic journal articles and chapters in edited volumes:

“A Philosophy of Meat in the Early Twenty-First Century” in Andrea Borghini and Patrik Engisch, eds. A Philosophy of Recipes: Making, Experiencing, and Valuing (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

“Meat Mimesis: Laboratory-Grown Meat as a Study in Copying,” in Osiris, Volume 35, 2020, “Food Matters.”

“The Question of Food and Philosophy in Levinas,” in The Oxford Levinas Handbook, Michael Morgan, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

“Culture and Law in Weimar Jewish Medievalism: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Julius Guttmann,” in Modern Intellectual History, 11, 1 (2014), pp 119-146

“The Future of Futurism,” in Boom: a Journal of California, Winter 2013, Vol. 3, No. 4

“From Heresy to Nature: Leo Strauss’s History of Modern Epicureanism” in Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism, Wilson Shearin and Brooke Holmes, es. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

“The Uses of Walter: Walter Benjamin and the Counterfactual Imagination,” in History & Theory Vol. 49 (October 2010), pp. 361-383.

“How to Read Maimonides after Heidegger: The Cases of Levinas and Strauss” in The Cultures of Maimonideanism, James T. Robinson, ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2009)

“Persecution and the Art of Critique: Leo Strauss between Secularism and Religion,” in Politics and Culture, special issue on “The Critical,” Winter 2009 Issue 4.

review essays:

“The Twice Unearthed: the Trope of Censorship and the Sense of History” in History & Theory, Vol. 61 (March 2022)

“Seagulls! On Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom,” in History & Theory, Vol. 60 (March 2021), pp. 177-184

“Notes on Camps, or, Counterfactual Führers and the Structure of the Joke,” on Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s Hi, Hitler, in History & Theory, Vol. 56 (September 2017), pp. 433–441

“Historiography of the Appetites: A Note on the Edible Series from Reaktion Books and the Commodity Model of Global Food History,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Vol. 17 No. 1, Spring 2017; pp. 74-75

“To the Planetarium – There Is Still Time! On James McFarland’s Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, History & Theory ,Vol. 53 (May 2014), pp. 253-263

“Within Sight of Syracuse” a review essay covering recent books on public intellectuals, in The Minnesota Review Vol. 68 (Summer 2007), pp. 159-165

book reviews:

“Kidding, Not Kidding: The Philosophy of Wisecracks” on David Shoemaker’s Wisecracks: On Humor and Morality, in Chronicle of Higher Education Review, June 27th, 2024

“Ignorance is Bliss?” on Peter Burke’s Ignorance: a global history in Current, April 25th, 2023

“Rockets and Voltaire: a dialogue on Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota” co-authored with Rebecca Ariel Porte, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16th, 2022.

“The Interpretation of Screens,” on Hannah Zeavin’s The Distance Cure, in Bookforum Dec/Jan/Feb 2021-2.

“The Involuted Palate, or the Savage Crinkle of Future Snacks,” on Larissa Zimberoff’s Technically Food, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, August 11th, 2021.

“Paradise on a Plate,” on Ben Katchor’s The Dairy Restaurant, in the Times Literary Supplement, November 20th, 2020

“Dishing: On John Birdsall’s ‘The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard'” in The Los Angeles Review of Books, October 22nd, 2020

“Why Look at Flying Saucers?” On Colin Dickey’s The Unidentified, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, October 7th, 2020

“A Culture of Promises: On Liz Marshall’s ‘Meat the Future'” in The Los Angeles Review of Books, August 31st, 2020

“The Enigma of Rescue: On a Recent History of the New School for Social Research,” review of Judith Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and the University in Exile, Gotham Center for New York History, June 11, 2020. Republished at the New School for Social Research’s Public Seminar, July 30th, 2020.

“Recline of the West,” Review of Nathan Kravis, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 21, 2017

“The State that I am in: Hannah Arendt in America,” Review of Richard King’s Arendt and America, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, February 28, 2016

“Three Contemporary Spinozas,” Review of recent works on Spinoza, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, April 18, 2015

“Notes on ‘Note-by-Note’: A New Molecular Cuisine?” Review of Hervé This, Note-by-Note Cooking: The Future of Food, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, March 5th, 2015

“Friends of Leo,” Review of Robert Howse’s Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, October 6, 2014

Review of Massimo Montanari and Jean Louis Flandrin, eds. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, in Gastronomica: a Journal of Food and Culture, Fall 2014, Vol. 14, N. 3, pp 100-101

“A Metabolic Politics?” Review of Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics, in Theory and Event, Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2014

Review of Heather Paxson, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America in Gastronomica: a Journal of Food and Culture Fall 2013, Vol. 13, N. 3, pp 82-3 

Review of Anthony Bourdain, Get Jiro! in Gastronomica: a Journal of Food and Culture Spring 2014, Vol. 14, N. 1, pp 76-7

Review of William F.H. Altman, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 2, 2011

Review of Benjamin Lazier, God, Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars, in the Association for Jewish Studies Review V. 33 N. 2, November 2009, pp. 424-427

Review of Markman Ellis’s Coffee House: A Cultural History, in Gastronomica: a Journal of Food and Culture Spring 2007, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 111-112

Review of Cathryn Vasseleu’s Textures of Light, in Film-Philosophy vol. 6 no. 9, May 2002

selected interviews:

Evan Kleiman of KCRW’s Good Food spoke with me about my book Meat Planet.

Sam Bloch of New Food Economy interviewed me about my book Meat Planet.

Here’s a short interview I did with usesthis.com, about the tools I use for writing and working.

Brooke Palmieri interviewed me about my book Thinking in Public, for the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas.