Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [68]
Mark Lisanti is a writer living in Los Angeles. He’s the founding editor of Defamer, a blog about Hollywood, and is editor at large at Movieline.com, where he writes about film, TV, and the dizzying magic of Tinseltown. He’s contributed to Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and Radar. Though he grew up just outside of New York City, he has never actually been to the Jersey Shore.
Ben Mandelker is a Los Angeles–based screenwriter and blogger whose pop culture observations and multimedia creations have been cited in Entertainment Weekly, US Magazine, The New York Times, Details, Spin, USA Today, The Washington Post, and the Houston Chronicle, among other media outlets. In 2004, Ben co-founded the Web site TVgasm.com, which Entertainment Weekly labeled as one of the top twenty-five entertainment Web sites on the Internet. In 2007, he left the site after selling it to Bunim/Murray Productions. He also served as a writer’s assistant on the Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe and worked on various television productions such as Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Strangers with Candy, and the WWE. He currently authors the site bsideblog.com.
Wendy Merrill, author of Falling into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl, is described by Anne Lamott as “a wonderful new voice—smart, funny and wildly real.” Wendy runs WAM Marketing Group, a unique marketing communications company based in Sausalito, California, where she currently lives aboveground and beyond her means.
Helaine Olen is the coauthor of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding—and Managing—Romance on the Job. Her articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Salon.com, AlterNet.org, and Condé Nast’s Cookie and the late Portfolio, among other places. She’s also contributed to the anthologies Modern Love and The Maternal Is Political. She lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Neal Pollack is the author of the best-selling parenting memoir Alternadad as well as several works of satirical fiction, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. A contributor to many publications and Web sites, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, Slate.com, Salon.com, Nerve.com, and Parents. com, Pollack lives in Los Angeles with his family. Harper Perennial will publish his next book, Stretch, in the Summer 2010.
Richard Rushfield has written on subjects ranging from teenage witches to politics for publications including The New York Times, Variety, Slate.com, VLife, Details, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times Magazine, BlackBook, CMJ, and Elle Décor. From 2000 to 2002, he wrote a column on film for Arena magazine. Since 1996, Richard and Adam Leff have co-authored Vanity Fair’s recurring infotainment feature, “The Intelligence Report.” His novel, On Spec, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2000. From 2005 to 2009, he gave service as entertainment editor of latimes.com and contributed numerous pieces to the paper. He is the author of Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the ’80s (Gotham Books, 2008), and is currently writing The Complete History of American Idol (Hyperion), forthcoming Winter 2011. Richard currently lives in Venice, California, with his wife, journalist Nicole LaPorte.
Rex Sorgatz is a writer, designer, entrepreneur, and media consultant based in New York. He is a contributing editor at Wired and his work appears in New York magazine and on NPR. His consulting agency, Kinda Sorta Media, works with a wide range of Internet and media companies. A former executive producer of msnbc.com, he blogs his Internet life in real time at Fimoculous.com. He is working on a novel called Everyone Is Famous.
Jerry Stahl is the author of the narcotic memoir classic Permanent Midnight and the novels Pain Killers; I, Fatty (film rights optioned by Johnny Depp); Perv—a Love