Joshua Wolf Shenk

Biography

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and editor-in-chief of the Believer magazine. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Slate, and River Teeth Journal, among many others. His mainstage Moth story “You Can Come Back” appears in the book Occasional Magic: True Stories about Defying the Impossible. He is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy (Mariner, 2006), a New York Times notable book, and Powers of Two (Houghton Mifflin, 2014), a national bestseller. “The Curse of Cool” is adapted from Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light, edited by Steffie Nelson (Rare Bird Books, 2020).

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2020

The Curse of Cool

By Joshua Wolf Shenk ,  Illustration by Kelsey Dake

In the fall of 2005, at the shuttle terminal of New York’s LaGuardia airport, I entered the security line and noticed, in front of me, a slight and slightly stooped older woman. After a couple of blinks, I recognized Joan Didion.
#VQRTRUESTORY / Fall 2018

Woe and Wonder

By Joshua Wolf Shenk

On a Saturday morning in early June, just before the heat spikes, I set out with my eight-year-old son from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. We start the way I drive to work—north on Spencer Street past rows of midcentury ranch houses; left around...