About Me

Writer

I’m the author of four non-fiction books, and I’m currently working on my fifth, a book about singing (Algonquin Books).

My most recent book is Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. Scientists have always disdained parapsychology, but there was a brief moment in the early 1930′s when the scientific community thought, well, okay, ectoplasm, seances and table rappings aside, maybe there’s something going on here.

The book before that was The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad. My second book, Waiting for My Cats to Die: a morbid memoir, came out in 2001. While positioned as a memoir, I used this book to research my family’s past and to contemplate what remains when we are gone.

Radio Commentator

I’m also a very occasional contributor to the NPR show, All Things Considered. You can listen to a story I did about five missing children in West Virginia here, and a story about unsolved murder and cold case squads here.

Social Media Developer

In 1990 I founded a NYC-based online service (aka social network) called Echo. Echo is an online community filled with people who log in everyday to talk about whatever—work, love, how hard life can be, and what’s on TV (my favorite obsession). I wrote about Echo and the internet in a book called, Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town.

I grew up on Long Island, and got a B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a graduate degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.