WHO WE ARE

Sam Apple
Publisher, Editor-in-Chief

Sam Apple, a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, is the former director of interactive media at Nerve. He has served as the editor-in-chief of New Voices Magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005, he received the annual Faux-Faulkner award. His second book, American Parent, was published in 2009 (Ballantine). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Email: samapple@thefastertimes.com

Adam Wilson
Deputy Editor, Arts Editor

Adam Wilson attended Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. His work appears in a number of publications including The Forward, Gigantic, The Rumpus, JBooks.com, Rugby.com, and Flavorwire.com, where he recently contributed a weekly column about the TV show Friday NightLights. He has an essay on “Golden Showers” in the anthology Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, and his short story “The Porchies” is forthcoming in Promised Lands: New Jewish Fiction on Longing and Belonging. In 2007 he was named a Distinguished Lecturer in SUNY New Paltz’s Louis and Mildred Resnick Distinguished Lecture Series, and he has twice twice been a finalist for Glimmer Train Story Prizes. He has read at such reputable venues as KGB Bar, The Museum of Sex, and The New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn. Email: adamwilson@thefastertimes.com

Olivia Scheck
Managing Editor, Mental Health Editor

Olivia is a recent graduate of Yale University, where she majored in cognitive science. In addition to her work as a managing editor and mental health correspondent for TFT, she is a monthly contributor to the website 3quarksdaily.com. While at Yale, Olivia conducted research on the moral psychology and decision-making processes of children and primates and is currently interested in applying this research to everyday life. Email: oliviascheck@thefastertimes.com

Josh Nathan-Kazis
News Editor, Politics Editor

Josh Nathan-Kazis was the editor of New Voices magazine from 2007-2009. He is a regular contributor to WBAI’s Beyond the Pale. He has written on Israel/Palestine, the decline of the American fraternal order, and development at the Brookln Navy Yard, among other issues. Email: joshnathankazis@thefastertimes.com

Daria Vaisman
Senior Editor, World Editor

Daria Vaisman’s writing has appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic Online, among others. She recently received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The MacDowell Colony. While living in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 2004 to 2007, Daria briefly worked for the country’s former prime minister, was an analyst at Transparency International, and later associate country director at Eurasia Foundation. She now monitors the post-Soviet “breakaway” states for Freedom House. She received a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University and a certificate from Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Her first book, a narrative non-fiction account of US foreign policy in the former Soviet Union, will be published by Free Press in 2011.

David Hirschman
Senior Editor

David Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. He has been mediabistro.com’s newsfeed editor since 2002, and contributes to a wide variety of online and offline publications.

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Michelle Legro
Senior Editor, Science Editor

Michelle studied art history and creative writing at Columbia University. She has worked at Cabinet, Open City, and New York Public Radio.

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Adam Baer
Editor-at-Large, Travel Editor

A former Travel + Leisure correspondent and NPR producer, Adam Baer has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, GQ, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Men’s Health, among many other publications. In the online sphere, he has contributed to Slate.com, Salon.com, the New Republic Online, the Atlantic.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, NPR.org, and CondeNet. His essays have appeared in books including “A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise” and “Lost and Found: Stories from New York.” A born and bred New Yorker, he has lived in Los Angeles for five years and still wakes up on Eastern Standard Time..

Alec Appelbaum
Development Director, Business Editor

Alec Appelbaum writes about real estate, true-green business and architecture for the New York Times, Fast Company, New York magazine and others. He is Writer-at-Large for the Architect’s Newspaper, wrote Architectural Record’s “City Bites” blog in 2008 and contributes to UrbanOmnibus.net, a multimedia project of the Architectural League, and to the Forum for Urban Design. He covered tech stocks and economics for SmartMoney.com and Money magazine during the dotcom frenzy. His work appears in business-school syllabi and cases. He lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Zoe Singer
Food Editor

Zoe Singer is a freelance food writer and co-author of The Flexitarian Table. Her food writing, photography and recipes appear in publications including The Financial Times, Body & Soul Magazine, Epicurious.com and Chow.com. She is a regular contributor to Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan and is included in an upcoming collection of essays published by Edible Communities. A former food blogger for New York Magazine, she edits cookbooks for Food & Wine Magazine, blogs for FitPregnancy.com and still eats for two even though she already had the baby.

Lincoln Michel
Books Editor

Lincoln Michel’s fiction and criticism appear in The Oxford American, Mississippi Review, Bookforum, Esquire.com, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. He is a co-editor of Gigantic magazine and keeps a personal blog at lincolnmm.blogspot.com.

Katharine Whittemore
Parents Editor

Katharine Whittemore was the features editor at Wondertime magazine, the parenting magazine that didn’t read like a parenting magazine. It won two National Magazine Award nominations in its first two years, though that wasn¹t enough to keep it afloat in this economy. But it was a beautiful ride. She has also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon.com, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. She lives with her husband and two children in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Mason Lerner
Sports Editor

Mason Lerner is a freelance writer and stand-up comedian in Austin, TX. His works has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, ESPN the Magazine and many other publications. Lerner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Anthropology. He has a football soul that was torn in two by decades of torture at the hands of his hometown Houston Oilers before their exile in 1996 and their subsequent replacement by the Houston Texans, an organization that has been like an infestation of incurable head lice in its ability to keep Lerner scratching his gigantic dome. You see, Lerner was essentially a life-sized bobble-head doll until an extensive weight training program allowed his body to catch up with his planet-sized melon in 2003. When he is down, he closes his eyes and imagines Hakeem Olajuwon shooting baseline jumpers. He still believes that VY will be back. And don’t expect him to have anything nice to say about Oklahoma. Ever.

Ben Letzler
Advice Editor

Ben Letzler is a corporate lawyer in Boston, MA. His features have appeared in Film Threat, While You Were Sleeping, Aufbau, Parterre Box and Boys Life, among other publications. As an author of letters, he has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Independent, New York, The New York Post, The Village Voice, The American Scholar, and The Rock, the journal of the Anglo-Catholic Church of Canada. He is a prolific translator of German texts on contemporary art and music, and has appeared by allusion in The Nation and The National Post.

Tess Aldrich
Health Editor

Tess Aldrich is a Women’s Health and Adult Nurse Practitioner with a background in public health research. She received a Master’s in Nursing from the Yale School of Nursing and holds a degree in Population & International Health from Harvard and a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Tess previously worked at Gynuity Health Projects in New York on studies relating to postpartum hemorrhage in developing countries, medical abortion, and HIV. Before that, she was a researcher in Mexico City with the Population Council, focusing on strategies to improve the quality of reproductive health care. Tess enjoys fiddle music, running, and reading/writing short stories.

Alex Zalben
Tech Editor

Alex Zalben is a writer living in New York City. He’s written for McSweeney’s, Modern Humorist Newsarama, Nerve, and AMC. He’s also one fifth of the comedy group Elephant Larry, creators of the viral hit ’Minesweeper: The Movie.’ Alex did not know love until he bought his first Mac.

Chanan Tigay
Nonsense Editor

An award-winning journalist, Chanan Tigay has covered the Israeli-Arab conflict as a Middle East based correspondent, the attacks of Sept. 11 from New York City, and has reported out of Ukraine and Poland. He has contributed to publications ranging from Newsweek and The New York Times, to the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, The Jerusalem Post, and United Press International. He has interviewed leading American political figures including Sens. Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, along with top Israeli parliamentarians such as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres. A writing instructor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Chanan holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a B.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Eryn Loeb
Love and Death Editor

Eryn Loeb has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Bookforum, the L Magazine, and Bitch Magazine, among other publications, and is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine. Since 2005, she has written the “Girl, Interrupting” column for Bookslut.com, taking a monthly look at how feminism lives (and dies) on the page. She lives in New York.

Kolby Yarnell
Design Editor
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.Kolby Yarnell was formerly the senior editor of Culture+Travel magazine as well as the literary editor of the New York Sun. He has written for New York, the New York Times Style Magazine, and Travel+Leisure, among others.

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Veronica Mittnacht
Assistant Editor, Insider Editor

Rebecca Taylor
Assistant Editor, Help Desk Editor

Rebecca Taylor was born and raised in the Virginia woods. Now she lives and writes in New York City.

Aseel Najib
Assistant Editor

Aseel Najib is an associate editor of the Journal of Politics and Society, and a senior editor of the Columbia Political Review. When not pursuing editorial happiness at The Faster Times, she can be found exploring creative nonfiction, debating political theory, taking aimless walks and enjoying live music.

Jonathan Kulick
Assistant World Editor

Jonathan Kulick is a career dilettante, whose business cards say he has been an engineer, policy analyst, and research director, with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford and an M.Phil. in policy analysis from RAND. He has written on environmental policy, decisionmaking, security, and governance, and published a daily newsletter on Georgia (grapes, not peanuts). He has lived in East Africa, the Middle East, and the South Caucasus, and now resides in Los Angeles.

Beth Miller
Assistant Arts Editor

Jacob Zalewski
Assistant Sports Editor

Jacob Zalewski is a recent graduate of the University of Houston. He is also the founder and CEO of the One Step Closer Foundation, which is dedicated to helping those with cerebral palsy. He once finished at the final table at a World Series of Poker event.

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Contributing Editors:

Josh Hersh
Shana Liebman
Alex Benowitz-Fredericks

Copy Editor:

Julia Sirmons

Julia Sirmons has worked as an editor, proofreader, and ESL teacher. She favors a common-sense approach to serial commas.

Design:

Mandalee Meisner
Designer-at-Large

Mandalee Meisner studied journalism in Kansas before moving to Brooklyn. In 2005, she began designing for Nerve.com. She designed Babble.com and now keeps it looking pretty. She dreams of one day bringing competitive empty beer can stacking to the Olympics.

Laura Devendorf
Senior Designer

Laura Devendorf is a designer, developer and scrabble enthusiast with a degree in studio art from UC Santa Barbara and another one in Computer Science on the way. You can find her glorified napkin doodles at www.artfordorks.com.

Mike Auteri
Associate Web Developer

Mike Auteri has been designing and developing web sites for about a decade. He mostly likes to work with open source technologies like PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Drupal. One of his most recent projects is Eeny.me, a URL shortening service that ties in quite nicely with Twitter. Most recently, Mike founded a new web shop called Even5 Solutions with a friend and fellow web developer. To learn more about Mike, you can follow him on Twitter.

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OUR MISSION

The print newspaper is in trouble. A lot of journalists joke about it. We don’t think it’s funny. Most of the writers and editors at The Faster Times have written for a print newspaper. They were our livelihoods, but they were also much more than our livelihoods. They were a way of pushing back the chaos of the modern world. Things happened, and the next day you could read about those things in your morning paper. The orderliness might have been an illusion, but it was a comforting illusion.

Time is always fast, but some times are faster than others. For American journalism, these are faster times.

A few years ago, a daily accounting of the news still felt sufficient. Now, by the time our newspapers arrive on our doorsteps, we already know what they will say. This, of course, is not news. Everyone recognizes that the medium of the daily newspaper is too slow for our faster world. But the slowness itself is not the fundamental crisis facing American journalism. If speed is the solution, then the problem has already been solved. We have all of the blog posts and tweets we will ever need right now.

The crisis of American journalism is, instead, a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive. So, the question is not whether there is a way to keep up with the constant appetite for news, but whether there is a way to keep up without foregoing great writing and reporting.

There will be many different answers to the questions facing the journalism industry in the coming years. Our answer is The Faster Times, a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.

The Faster Times is a collective of great journalists who have come together to try something new. As we launch this July, we will have more than a hundred correspondents in over 20 countries. We have someone on the ground in Kenya and someone else reporting from Lebanon. Our arts section will cover not just film and books, but also theater and dance and photography. We will launch with seven writers on books alone. These writers are not “citizen journalists” but among the most accomplished and recognized names in their respective fields.

We’re not kidding ourselves. The Faster Times is not going to solve any major crises by itself. We are an organization owned and created by journalists. We have not sought any funding and, for the time being, we have very limited financial resources.

But while our limited resources will limit the number of reported pieces on the site in our first months of operation, we have no intention of shying away from the challenge. Our goal is to do what great papers have always done: look at the world with skeptical eyes and uncover information that the public needs to know. We will not, in most cases, be publishing 1200-word reported pieces, but we will be making calls and asking hard questions. And when our reporters discover something of interest, they will publish it and invite our readers to help push the story forward with their tips and insights.

Of course, these are not just faster times. They are also stranger times. And a quick look at The Faster Times will reveal that, despite the seriousness of our intentions, we also have a great appreciation for the not-so-serious. In our “Nonsense” section, we will have coverage of pro-wrestling and also a writer dedicated entirely to feet. In our Tech section, you can find not only great writing on the computer industry but also regular reports from our jetpacks correspondent.

We hope you’ll join us for this experiment in journalism. We are not sure what’s going to happen, but we are sure that we need new approaches. Time is of the essence.

The Faster Times is a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.