I’m a writer and reporter from Durham, North Carolina. Mostly I'm interested in the intersections of culture, politics, and economics, by which I mean the ways people understand themselves and what they're doing, and the ways those things are shaped by the material conditions we live under. In other (less abstract) words, I write about political movements, inequality, pop culture, the business of pop culture, art, and local development. That still sounds like a weird mix. Anyway, you can read my work at The Assembly, where I'm a contributing writer, as well as The New Republic, The Ringer, The Outline (RIP), Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Awl (RIP), In These Times, Scalawag, INDY Week, and elsewhere. I also have a day job as the director of content strategy at Duke University's Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, where I cover faculty research and publications, among other things.
My writing is informed, in direct and indirect ways, by my studies in philosophy and economics (as an undergrad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and ordinary language philosophy and Marxist political theory (as a graduate student at the University of Chicago). The stuff I worked on then—political violence, theories of subjectivity, the role of criticism, and the connections between art and politics—are still what I do now. I was just more obtuse and grad school-y then.
Sometimes I also take on other projects that seem interesting and turn out far more complicated than I was prepared for, like housing policy, making furniture, and designing this website. (Sorry if it's a little broken.)
You can find me on Twitter at @themhartman and by email at mrhartman9 at gmail dot com (if you're traditional) or themhartman at protonmail dot com (if you're security minded).