I’m a writer and reporter from Durham, North Carolina. Currently, I cover higher ed for The Assembly. Before that, I spent a decade as a freelance journalist writing about the intersections of culture, politics, and economics, by which I mean the ways people make sense of their lives and the ways our lives are shaped by the material conditions we live under.
In other (less abstract) words, I'm interested in political movements, inequality, pop culture, the business of pop culture, campus culture wars, local development, labor unions, and the dark money shaping colleges.
That still sounds like a weird mix. Maybe just read my work for The Assembly, 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 was never very good at this whole branding thing.
While freelancing, I also had day jobs in communications, mostly in higher ed (hence my new beat). Before I joined The Assembly full time, I was the interim associate dean of communications for Duke University's Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, where I covered 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 matt at theassemblync dot com (if you're traditional) or themhartman at protonmail dot com (if you're security minded).