Virtual Memories Show #167:
John Holl
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“I really think New Jersey has the most diverse food culture around.”
This week, John Holl joins the show to talk about his new book, Dishing Up New Jersey: 150 Recipes from the Garden State
“The internet has made some research easier, but it’s also made some reporters lazier. I feel fortunate having learned from reporters of the old school.”
We also get into how newsrooms and journalism have changed over his 20-year career, how he discovered the craft beer scene while reporting on the road, the farthest he’s traveled on a beer assignment, how the Blizzard of ’96 changed his life, why it can be hard to separate craft and mainstream beers, and where his love of NJ comes from. Go listen!
“I’m less interested in rare beers. I’m always looking for the next fun experience with new friends, or brewers, where I can have a well-made pint and a good time. My memories of the people are stronger than those of the liquid in the glass.”
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About our Guest
John Holl is a New Jersey native and covered the Garden State for the New York Times and the Newark Star-Ledger. He began his career at New Jersey Network Television and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wine Enthusiast, and many other publications. He is the award-winning editor of All About Beer magazine, the author of Dishing Up New Jersey
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Carton Brewing Co. in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Simon & Schuster). (We last talked 
, 
, 
, and, most recently 
, which was a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. A former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Boston Globe, he graduated from Oberlin College, earned a PhD from MIT, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, 
I recorded the intro and outro on the same setup. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. Kaplan by Carol Dronsfield.
(Grove Press). We discuss the evolution of comedy over the century (from vaudeville to comedy podcasters) and how he got started chronicling it, American comedy’s twin themes of struggle and influence, the connect-the-dots game of comedic lineage, the stories that didn’t make it into the book, comedy’s role in the civil rights struggle, Kliph’s autodidactic background and how it shapes his pursuit of history, the story of how he got kicked out of high school, and more! 
! We explore how her nihilistic, burned-out, drug-addicted post-punk-scene photographer-protagonist has grown over the course of three books of increasing mayhem and murder. (Hint: she doesn’t decide to become a nurturing mom and validate herself with a rich husband.) 
(Knopf), joins the show to talk about the thirteen years he spent working with the great artist 
(Fantagraphics, 2008); 
Hirschfeld’s Hollywood
(Abrams, 2001). He also authored a number of monographs on underappreciated artists for various museums.
joins the podcast on way too little sleep to talk about transgressing borders: national borders, panel borders, and familial borders. We talk about Diary’s hybrid structure and why it would have been unpitchable to a publisher (luckily, she had a two-book contract), the tightrope of portraying a 15-year-old girl’s affair with her mother’s 30-something boyfriend without making her strictly a victim or “asking for it”, and some audiences’ obsession with “the facts” of the book. We also get into her ongoing, decade-long multi-media project to recreate a life in Juarez, Mexico, her place in the comics scene (too young for the undergrounds, too old for the alternatives), her unrepeatable approach to making art, and more! 
, as well as many short stories, illustrations, and comics which have appeared in a variety of publications over the last 25 years. She has a master’s degree in Biomedical Communications from The University of Texas at Dallas, and was an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. She also studied at Charles University in Prague and L’Unversité D’Aix-Marseille in France. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Phoebe is currently working on a multi-media novel based on the lives of several families living on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She has traveled frequently to Juárez over the last 10 years to research the project.
! We discuss the societal bias against aging, what she learned by dyeing her hair gray, the decision to “self”-publish This Chair Rocks, why she doesn’t want to think about writing another book for at least a decade, the potentials of an all-age-friendly world, and more! 
and referred to by Alan Kay as “the first piece of digital “content” worth criticizing”; and the first electronic books — Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Trilogy and Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in 1992. After that there were a bunch of years spent on tool-making and in 2004 the Macarthur Foundation gave me a huge five-year grant to explore the question of what might happen to publishing in the internet era. with that grant I started 
, was published by HarperCollins in 1997. Ms. magazine called it “rocket fuel for launching new lives,” and it landed me on Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum enemies list. It also got me invited to join the board of the nascent Council on Contemporary Families, a group of distinguished family scholars. I belonged to the Artist’s Network of Refuse & Resist group that originated the anti-Iraq-invasion slogan and performance pieces titled “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War.” As a contributing editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine, I went to Laos to cover a village getting internet access via a bicycle-powered computer. Since 2000 I’ve been on staff at the American Museum of Natural History, where I write about everything under the Sun. The catalyst for Cutting Loose was puzzlement: why was our notion of women’s lives after divorce (visualize depressed dame on barstool) so different from the happy and energized reality? A similar question gave rise to my new book, 
. He is the winner of the 2012 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Gerhard Meier’s 
.
(Fantagraphics), 
, the Harvey Award-nominated cutting-edge comix anthology series. His solo books include 
and 
– underground urban comix that capture the intense, gritty underbelly of streetlife. Head was a frequent contributor to the Fantagraphics’ comix anthology quarterly Zero Zero. The Simon & Schuster’s comic book anthology 
featured Glenn’s work – a collection of personal stories depicting teenage angst. His project, Head Shots, a sketchbook of cartoon art, followed. From 2005 to 2010 Glenn edited and contributed to the Harvey and Eisner-nominated anthology 
(three issues). Over the past six years Glenn created his graphic epic,