About Max

Some kind of cultural primatologist.

I’m also a widely published, cited and translated journalist whose articles, columns, photos and narrated videos on economics, consumer and enterprise technology, venture capitalism, VR and porn and love and AI and brothels, crime in Florida, municipal bankruptcy in California, bullets in Colorado, bullet trains to Nowhereland, commercial real estate and the Panama Canal, architecture, big data, good cops, bad cops, employment, consumer, IP and securities law and energy policy have collectively attracted millions of readers to The Wall Street Journal, CBSi’s CNET and Village Voice Media’s LA Weekly, Slate, Corporate Counsel, the New Jersey Law Journal, Law Technology News and the American Lawyer, among other established print and digital publishers.

A former venture capital and technology reporter and columnist for CBSi’s CNET–the world’s most visited tech site–and a contributing commercial real estate columnist and reporter for The Wall Street Journal, my articles on Silicon Valley and a leaderless extremist movement received a Best Business reporting award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and a Best Feature News award from the Foundation for Biomedical Research, respectively.

I’ve freelanced for HBO Sports, and my work has been featured on Drudge and Curbed; promoted by the New York Times; referenced by the Brookings Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Washington Post; cited by Penguin’s 2013 book, “The Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity,” Princeton University Press’ 2014 book, “Why Government Fails So Often and How It Can Do Better,” and CQ Press’ 2016 college textbook, “Managing Urban America,” among others; written about by NPR’s KPCC, KCRW and KQED, the LA Times and Harvard University’s Nieman Lab; and translated by The Wall Street Journal into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish and German.

I studied economics at Georgetown, politics at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and anthropology at City University of New York.