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Michael Zelenko

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As seen in: The Atlantic, Medium, OneZero, The Verge, VICE, Flipboard, Pocket, The FADER, Rest of World
Covers:  culture, film, interviews, profiles, music
Senior Editor, Tech at @theatlantic. Previously at @restofworld, @ozm/@medium, @verge.
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No Concessions: Dirty Wars, Shady Drones and Tapped Phones

No Concessions: Dirty Wars, Shady Drones and Tapped Phones

www.thefader.com — Wednesday's headline news that the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of U.S. citizens elicited a rising swell of public anger. Al Gore dubbed the phone debacle "obscenely outrageous," and Thursday's New York Times editorial didn't waste much ink, putting it bluntly: "The administration has now lost all credibility." The White House, though, seemed unfazed by the revelation, calling the program "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats." It feels almost serendipitous that this weekend marks the premiere of Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley's Dirty Wars, a scathing documentary that follows Scahill-a National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine-as he traces the blood-strewn path of the covert component of America's War on Terror.
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No Concessions: Director James Marsh on Shadow Dancer and the Creative Power of Wagner

No Concessions: Director James Marsh on Shadow Dancer and the Creative Power of Wagner

www.thefader.com — Earlier this week, I strolled through the summer heat that's recently cracked over New York to meet Academy Award-winning director James Marsh in SoHo's posh Crosby Street Hotel. Marsh, who had flown in the previous night to promote his new feature film, Shadow Dancer, is best known for his documentaries, which include Man on Wire, the story of tightrope walker Philippe Petit, and Project Nim, a fascinating account of a chimpanzee (Nim Chimpsky, to be exact) raised as a human child by an Upper Westside family in the 1970s.
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The Birth of Phone Hacking & How It Set the Stage for the News Corp. Scandal

The Birth of Phone Hacking & How It Set the Stage for the News Corp. Scandal

bullettmedia.com — On March 21st, 2002, a 13-year-old girl name Milly Dowler mysteriously disappeared on her way home from school in Surrey, England. While a massive search team scoured the region, the girl's family called her cell phone repeatedly, leaving voicemail messages. That her voicemails were being regularly deleted suggested she was still alive, a false hope that would eventually redouble the pain of her family's loss. Six months later, mushroom pickers in nearby woods discovered her decomposed remains. It was determined that she had been killed shortly after her abduction. The messages weren't being listened to by Milly, but by phone hackers employed by News Corporation's newspaper News of the World .
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The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Bitcoin, the World's Most Enigmatic Currency

The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Bitcoin, the World's Most Enigmatic Currency

bullettmedia.com — IT'S FRIDAY afternoon on a cold winter's day in New York and the city is swathed in a blanket of gray felt clouds. Peter Sereti, co-owner of the midtown diner Hudson Eatery, sits at the bar of his restaurant bundled in a thick cardigan and sips a cappuccino. Born and raised in New York but of Greek heritage, Sereti has the Old World predilection of taking his time in conversation, circling the subject at hand before coming in for a landing. In July 2011, Hudson Eatery became the second restaurant in Manhattan to accept bitcoin, the enigmatic online crypto-currency launched two years earlier.
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Photographer Daniel Arnold on His Return to Instagram & His Scariest Confrontation

Photographer Daniel Arnold on His Return to Instagram & His Scariest Confrontation

bullettmedia.com — A warm beanie pulled snuggly over his head, the bushy-bearded photographer Daniel Arnold takes a seat on the patio of a Brooklyn bar on a frosty evening in early March. Despite the cold, Arnold opens up like a steamed clam, quick and easy: in the first three minutes of conversation, he reveals that it's the eve of his 33 rd birthday, a day that always makes him anxious, and that he's just resigned from his job as the animation manager for Nickelodeon's website, a decision that he's still grappling with. In a word, Arnold is candid-and that makes a lot of sense.
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Noomi Rapace on 'Dead Man Down,' Her Real-Life Scars, & Sweden's Dark Side

Noomi Rapace on 'Dead Man Down,' Her Real-Life Scars, & Sweden's Dark Side

bullettmedia.com — Sitting in the back room of a retail space in New York's bubbly SoHo neighborhood, Noomi Rapace gives off an energy instantly recognizable to fans of her work: cold, dark, and intimate. She is dressed head to toe in black, her hair pulled back so tightly it gives off a reflective sheen. Ever since making her international film debut in Niels Arden Oplev's original adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2009, Rapace has made a career of playing raw and complex characters on the big screen.
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Inside the World of Astrology Guru Susan Miller

Inside the World of Astrology Guru Susan Miller

bullettmedia.com — For someone who woke up at half past four this morning, Susan Miller doesn't look tired. It's a late summer afternoon and Miller is chipper sitting outside an Upper East Side café. With her auburn hair perfectly laid, her makeup flawless, and her summer dress neatly cinched at the waist, the astrologist exudes the radiance of a bubbly schoolgirl. In speech Miller is tireless-a veritable conversational athlete, leaping between subjects, balancing difficult topics, and tackling questions at a pace most would find exhausting. "I wasn't born with family connections or family money," she smiles innocently. "But God gave me a better resource: unlimited energy."
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A Day in the Life: Mission Chinese Food's Danny Bowien

A Day in the Life: Mission Chinese Food's Danny Bowien

bullettmedia.com — Danny Bowien is wearing sweat pants and he doesn't like it. "I need shorts," the 30-year-old culinary wonder behind Mission Chinese Food says, coming out of a Chelsea gym on a warm August morning. It's only ten in the morning, but Bowien's already been up for four hours, in keeping with his strict daily wake-up time of 6 a.m. Going to the gym every morning revs him up for the rest of the day. He needs the energy. It's only been three months since Mission Chinese Food opened its New York satellite, eschewing a predictable Brooklyn venue and opting for a spot with a basement entrance on the Lower East Side.
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Live: Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Oktophonie" at New York's Park Armory

Live: Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Oktophonie" at New York's Park Armory

www.thefader.com — There may be no better venue for a performance of "Oktophonie," the work by the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, than New York's Park Avenue Armory. Under his aural guidance, the Armory's immense 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall-one of the largest spaces of its kind in the city-transforms into a three-dimensional sonic canvas of enormous proportion. Experiencing the work in a more modest setting would be an injustice. On show through Wednesday, "Oktophonie" is one 70-minute-long chunk of Stockhausen's epic, 25-year-in-the-making, 29-hour-long super-opera cycle Licht (meaning "light"). Completed in 2003, four year's before Stockhausen's death, Licht is composed of seven different operas, each associated with a different day of the week.
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The Old Spice Ad Guru Talks Super Bowl Commercials

The Old Spice Ad Guru Talks Super Bowl Commercials

www.thefader.com — Of the millions of commercials you've seen over your lifetime, probably few stand out as memorably as the 2010 Old Spice ad, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." It was smart, funny, slick, mystifying, and crafted with an attention to detail you'd expect to find in a feature-length movie, not a 30-second spot for body wash. Apparently we weren't the only ones to think so: the spot earned Weiden+Kennedy, the ad agency behind it, a Primetime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Commercial." In the wake of the most expensive night in advertisement-also known as the Super Bowl-we caught up with Eric Kallman, the co-creater of "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like."
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GrandLife Hotels - GrandLife Interviews: Artist & Naturalist Steve Quinn " GrandLife " Best of Ne...

GrandLife Hotels - GrandLife Interviews: Artist & Naturalist Steve Quinn " GrandLife " Best of Ne...

www.grandlifehotels.com — Alaska Brown Bear, in Progress © AMNH/D. Finnin Wolf Diorama in progress © AMNH/R. Mickens Wapiti Diorama, Hall of North American Mammals © AMNH/D. Finnin It's not often one spends his entire career at a single company. But then again, not everyone manages to land a dream gig as an artist at the American Museum of Natural History. A wildlife zealot from a young age (he recalls ditching a date in his car to chase down a wild turkey), Stephen C. Quinn joined New York's best loved naturalist institution in 1974, the ink still wet on his degree from the Ridgewood School of Art and Design where he studied under the masters of the diorama arts.
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No Concessions: Sebastian Junger and His Elegiac Film for Tim Hetherington

No Concessions: Sebastian Junger and His Elegiac Film for Tim Hetherington

www.thefader.com — Welcome to FADER's new film column hosted by me, Michael Zelenko. What can you expect to see here every week? Interviews with up-and-coming, original talent; conversations with first-time directors as well as veterans of the field; spotlights on smaller films you may not have heard about and films from beyond America's borders. Sometimes we might do a roundup of the best "Exciting Military Movies Based on Real Life" Netflix has to offer, or maybe even dip into TV. Other times we'll talk to costume designers, animal trainers and other film crew members you rarely hear from.
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No Concessions: Love, Loss and Liberace

No Concessions: Love, Loss and Liberace

www.thefader.com — For anyone born after 1980, Liberace may be a relatively arcane character-chances are even your parents weren't big fans of the performer known as Mr. Showmanship. But for your grandparents, Liberace was a force of nature: Lady Gaga, Elton John, and Ricky Martin all rolled up into one gay, glitzy, jewel-encrusted package. At his core, Liberace-born W?adziu Valentino Liberace in 1919-was a classically trained piano player, and a gifted one at that. At seven years old, he had memorized complicated compositions, and by his teens was a regular performer at theaters, nightclubs, and on radio stations in and around his native Milwaukee.
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No Concessions: Terry Crews on Arrested Development, Hollywood and Pumping Iron

No Concessions: Terry Crews on Arrested Development, Hollywood and Pumping Iron

www.thefader.com — You can count on one hand the number of NFL players who successfully traded touchdowns for Tinsel Town-OJ Simpson comes to mind, as does Carl Weathers and Jim Brown. In the last decade Terry Crews, who had a 7-year NFL career in the '90s, has joined that tiny club. Crews is a muscular guy, and like other athletes-turned-actors he kick-started his career by playing characters with names like Big T, Big James, or simply, Thug. In the last few years he's eased into his career, expanding his repertoire to include more complex roles like Lonny Church in HBO's The Newsroom and family fare, like the sitcom Are We There Yet?
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No Concessions: Olivier Assayas and the Art of Teenagehood

No Concessions: Olivier Assayas and the Art of Teenagehood

www.thefader.com — It's no simple feat pegging down Olivier Assayas because the French director works between genres, and rarely makes the same sort of film twice. Look at his oeuvre of the last decade: 2004's Clean, in which a woman haunted by her drug-addled past attempts to put the pieces of her life back together; 2007's Boarding Gate, a sprawling (and unfortunately sloppy) "globalist thriller"; 2008?s beautifully nuanced Summer Hours about the dissolution of family and the inevitable procession of time; and the 2010 miniseries Carlos, a brilliant, if overly-polished portrayal of real-life revolutionary terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez.
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No Concessions: Four Micro-Interviews from the Tribeca Film Festival

No Concessions: Four Micro-Interviews from the Tribeca Film Festival

www.thefader.com — The organizers of the 13th annual Tribeca Film Festival couldn't have foreseen the gruesome headlines of the last two weeks: marathon bombings and city lockdowns, fertilizer explosions, barges on fire, poisoned letters, and not one, but two deadly earthquakes. The parade of misery gave Tribeca an air of macabre surprise: step out of a screening and you're met by a new and even more unbelievable disaster. But the newsflashes did something else, too: they transformed the theaters into 300-seat emergency relief pods that shot you away to the slums of Istanbul; or to tiny snow-bound towns in Maine; or even through history, to watch the dawning of the age of teenagehood.
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No Concessions: The Project and the Conservative Film Industrial Complex

No Concessions: The Project and the Conservative Film Industrial Complex

www.thefader.com — Have you ever tasted ketchup that's gone bad? I hadn't, until a couple weeks ago. Ketchup ferments, and although the effect isn't necessarily bad-if anything it's sweeter-there's an undeniable sensation of something not right, of something off. That's the same feeling I had while watching The Project, a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month to a packed audience. The Project follows the progress of the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF), a highly trained and expertly equipped outfit tasked with combating pirates in Somalia waterways.
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Roberta's Pizza and the Tricky World of Unpaid Internships

Roberta's Pizza and the Tricky World of Unpaid Internships

bullettmedia.com — In the last couple days, Roberta's Pizza, a popular NY establishment in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood has been feeling the heat. The eatery is in a deep dish of disdain after-thanks to an old fashioned telephone pole flyer rant-their Craigslist ad for interns hit DNAInfo.com, the Gothamist, and everywhere in between. You see, Roberta's is looking for interns who can commit 16 unpaid hours a week for three months to work on the restaurant's farm and "help maintain our bee hives, harvest honey, build and maintain the compost, help with carpentry projects, such as building planter boxes and hoop houses."
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The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #1: György Dragomán On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #1: György Dragomán On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

therumpus.net — The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #1: György Dragomán on the Danube An Introduction to The Rumpus International Rivers Interview Series "For me writing is indeed very close to collection, but it is not a process of collection, much rather a way for cataloging your collection." The International Rivers Interview Series was born of two unrelated events. The first was a Roni Horn exhibit I saw some years back in New York featuring the work Still Water (The River Thames, For Example). Horn framed multiple close-up shots of the Thames passing through central London and approached the river with a number of questions.
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The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #3: Sasa Stanisic On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #3: Sasa Stanisic On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

therumpus.net — The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #3: Sasa Stanisic on the Danube Sasa Stanisic was born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina and lived there until 1992, at which point his family fled the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. He currently resides in Germany. How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (2008), Stanisic's first book, is a self-portrait of a precociously creative young boy as he wades through the ugly swamp of ethnic violence and political destabilization of the Balkans during the 90s. Chapter titles like "When flowers are just flowers, how Mr. Hemingway and Comrade Marx feel about each other, who's the real Tetris champion, and the indignity suffered by Bogoljub Balvan's scarf" bleed into a narrative equally lyrical.
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The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #2: Dubravka Ugresic On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #2: Dubravka Ugresic On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

therumpus.net — The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #2: Dubravka Ugresic on the Danube Born in the former Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia), Dubravka Ugresic began her career writing children's television programs and books. In nearly four decades of writing and editing, she has published books on Russian contemporary fiction, edited anthologies of Russian avant-garde writing, translated texts into Croatian, written more than half a dozen books and published countless articles in European and American magazines. [To learn more about The Rumpus International Rivers Interview project click here.] As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 90s, nationalist fervor erupted.
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The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #4: Dumitru Tsepeneag On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #4: Dumitru Tsepeneag On The Danube - The Rumpus.net

therumpus.net — We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.' We don't recount our dreams; we construct them with the materials of reality. We aren't looking for God, psychic truth or authenticity, but for esthetic effect. That's why I baptized our movement Structural, or Esthetic, Onirism. Dreams and music were our models.
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Islam Rises From Chechnya's Ashes | World Policy Institute

Islam Rises From Chechnya's Ashes | World Policy Institute

www.worldpolicy.org — (Subscribe to World Policy Journal through SAGE) An Online Exclusive from the Fall 2012 Democracy Issue By Michael Zelenko There is a new Grozny today. Nine years ago, the United Nations declared the capital of Chechnya "the most destroyed city in the world," and given the situation on the ground that was scarcely hyperbole. A ruthless campaign to quell a separatist movement had gutted whole apartment buildings and neighborhoods, leaving their entrails strewn across abandoned Grozny streets. In large parts of the city, all vestiges of infrastructure had been erased, replaced with a lunar landscape of shell-blow craters.
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Democracy in Decline? | World Policy Institute

Democracy in Decline? | World Policy Institute

www.worldpolicy.org — An Online Exclusive from the Fall 2012 Democracy Issue By Michael Zelenko In May and June 2012, Greece held elections that promised to radically resculpt the European landscape. Britain's Guardian called the ballot the "most important election for decades." Business Insider labeled it "the most anticipated Greek election in history." Yet despite the gravitas attributed to the decision, just under 63 percent of voters cast a ballot. In the birthplace of democracy, for one of the most important elections in that nation's history, voter turnout was the lowest it has been in at least 70 years. In his essay "Viva Democracy!"
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