Hi! I’m Daniel D’Addario, a freelance writer. Until recently, I worked for the New York Observer, where I was responsible for culture features as well as the “Eight-Day Week” calendar section. I have reported for and contributed to Newsweek, Slate, The Daily, and Interview, as well as for websites including The Awl, Capital, The Daily Beast, Nerve, Urlesque, and This Recording. I was, in college, the editor of the Ivy League gossip site IvyGate. I was once on Jeopardy!’s college championship.
I hold a degree in American studies and English from Columbia, and in my time there interned at Random House, The New Yorker, Time, and Granta. I’m especially interested in film, literary, and cultural reporting and criticism. I live in Brooklyn.
Here are clips:
Selected pieces include profiles of downtown drag impresario Jack Ferver, actor Chris Messina, playwright and perma-famous character actor Wallace Shawn, European noble directors and BFFs Tatiana von Furstenberg and Francesca Gregorini, child actor-cum-network executive Nick Cannon, burgeoning web mogul (by way of tabloids) Bonnie Fuller, and three bloggers named Molly.
I also chronicled trends in self-publishing and apocalyptic pop music; wrote gossip items for which I interviewed Jennifer Egan, Philip Treacy, Christine O’Donnell, and Natalie Portman’s aspiring-author dad; and party-reported at the New York City Ballet, the GLAAD Awards, art-world parties, and midtown luncheons.
[all Observer pieces here]
“This fan-maintained episode database helps contestants prepare for Jeopardy!,” 02/11/2011, essay not in the form of a question
-“Matt Cherette is going to move to New York City,” 02/25/2010, about a young gossip journalist
-“Very recent history: Charles Pierce,” 03/24/2010, about a famous female impersonator
-“Hello, all that!,” 06/03/2010, a personal essay about leaving New York
-“Some summer interns,” 07/07/2010, about the new sorts of summer employment
-“IRL made me hate you,” 07/08/2010, a parody of web-2.0 nihilism
-“The slap that England deserves,” 08/17/2010, a review of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap
-“The girl in the dress: Taylor Swift’s endless reign,” 12/27/2010, about confessional teen-pop
-“The rapture, sideways,” 08/28/2011, a review of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers
-“High on study drugs,” 05/09/2010, reporting on college-library Adderall users
-“Fall’s hottest college courses,” 09/06/2010, the semester’s most zeitgeisty higher-ed offerings
-“The power of the Booker,” 10/12/2010, reporting on how Britain’s top literary prize boosts American sales and prestige
-“The curious case of the instant classic,” 01/11/2010, about the changing standards of the Criterion Collection
-“Streep first, character second,” 02/02/2010, about Meryl Streep’s generational appeal
-“Top 10 most impressive debuts of the decade,” a list for “20/10” project
-“Five reasons why actors write fiction,” 10/18/2010, an investigation into James Franco, Pamela Anderson, Steve Martin, and the rest of the Hollywood Round Table
-“The six senses of Peter Morgan,” 10/15/2010, with the screenwriter of The Queen and Hereafter
- “She’s such a Charlotte!,” 11/03/2010, a review of Antichrist and Sex and the City 2 on DVD
-“Miranda Richardson, queen of the Castle,” 11/17/2010, with the Made in Dagenham actress
-“Pontius at the Marmont,” 12/16/2010, with Chris Pontius, star of Jackass 3D and Somewhere
-“Melissa Leo’s golden moment,” 12/17/2010, upon her Golden Globe nomination for The Fighter
-“Steve Buscemi takes us back,” 04/28/2011, upon the release of the documentary Blank City
-“For beginners,” 08/19/2010, about a summer spent teaching English in England
-“You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter,” 09/21/2010, about Easy A, Hester Prynne, and adolescence (mine and others’)
-“Brushing out the mothballs,” 11/15/2010, about Morning Glory and its ancestor,Network
-“Our novels, ourselves,” 03/07/2011, about favorite novels of mine by Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, and Alan Warner
-“Dungeon Bunnies,” a review of Our Idiot Brother, 08/26/2011
-“Portrait of a reporter in mid-sneer,” 09/28/2010, a review of David Rakoff’s Half Empty
- “Hoda Kotb takes her broadcast persona retail in White Plains,” 10/21/2010, reporting from the front lines of Hoda Kotb’s charm offensive
-“James Franco: overexposed and underappreciated,” 10/29/2010, how I came to love America’s most expensively educated actor
-“‘Family Matters’ and Steve Urkel’s dedicated fan base on Facebook, Wikipedia, and UrkelNet,” 09/29/2010, about Urkel’s cult following online
-“David Archuleta, Wikipedia’s most-edited music star, and either a tenor or baritone,” 10/06/2010, Wikipedia-history trawling
-“Ousted Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin socially networks — on Facebook,” 10/08/2010, about the Social Network figure’s real-life web presence, on the website whose leadership forced him out
-“‘Why are you reading this?’,” 10/21/2010, about gossip websites and their eternally battling commenters
-“Bieber, sex and Obama on bit.ly,” 10/25/2010, about URL-shorteners’ uses, abuses, and poignant permanence
-“Urlesque’s NaNoWriMo awards,” 11/22/2010, a dissection of the aspiring writers’ playground that is the National Novel Writing Month forums
Assorted posts, 12/2009-05/2009
-“McEwan’s England, and mine,” 07/12/2010, about Ian McEwan and experience, real and synthetic
-“Salvatore Romano’s vanishing act,” 07/22/2010, about Mad Men and gay men
-“Your favorite TV show isn’t art,” 10/29/2010, a polemic against recap culture
-Writing on conspiracy theories, Roman Polanski, Boris Johnson, David Lean and more can be found here and here.
-You can find “The mouse race,” a cover story I wrote for The Eye, the Spectator’s weekly magazine, on campus app developers, here.
-“Adopting a new tone,” 10/2009, a review of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs
-“It is written,” 04/2009, about the Slumdog Millionaire Oscars and the notion of “destiny”
