Hi there. My name's Nash. I’m a writer and academic-in-training; I used to be a journalist. This website made more sense three years ago, when I wanted a place to showcase my journalism, but I don’t want to give up the domain name, so here we are.
My first novel, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, came out in May 2023 from The Overlook Press. The paperback edition goes on sale on May 28, 2024.
It’s about boarding school, and about Adderall, and about growing up. Click the green link to the left if you wanna learn more — or, better yet, just go ahead and buy it.
Also, subscribe to my Substack. I don’t write there as often as I’d hoped, but when I do I think it’s pretty good.
I’m a Ph.D student in the Program in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. I study the politics of paranoia, with a particular focus on contemporary conspiracy theories and how they take shape online and through other media. More generally, my research is interested in how the media we use reshape the narratives by which we understand ourselves, others, and the communities to which we belong.
Before boarding the Good Ship Academia, I was a journalist. For three years after college, I was a staff writer and correspondent for TIME Magazine. Most recently, I was in Washington as TIME’s congressional correspondent. When I wasn’t waddling around the Capitol asking Ted Cruz and Nancy Pelosi for quotes, I traveled around the United States reporting on American political life in the age of Trump and the characters who populated it. I profiled Beto O’Rourke during his 2018 run for the Senate, congressman Matt Gaetz, Senator Jeff Flake, and Judge Roy Moore.
I came to D.C. from Hong Kong, where I spent two years covering the politics and culture of East and Southeast Asia. I've reported on the drug war in the Philippines, the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong, the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, and teenage rappers in Indonesia. I write a lot of profiles: my story on Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, Hong Kong's top lawmaker, was Time's cover in September 2016. When my editors in Hong Kong and Washington would let me, I also wrote about culture; I profiled figures like the electronic music artist Porter Robinson and the comedian John Mulaney; occasionally, I reviewed albums for both print and web.
I left journalism for academia in 2018; in June of 2019, I finished my M.A. in the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities. This is where I began thinking more rigorously about the relationship between digital media and political culture, especially Trumpism; of particular interest was the nihilism that seemed to characterize so much of online political discourse. I spent my year at Chicago up to my neck in Marxist, psychoanalytic, and affect theory; I used the word “phenomenological” a lot. I wrote a thesis, advised by Professor Patrick Jagoda, on David Foster Wallace’s fanboys and detractors and what they tell us about cultural attachments in an increasingly mediated present.
(You can read my thesis here — but God, why would you.)
I received my B.A. in May 2015 from Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, I studied in the Writing Seminars, the university's creative writing program, which awarded me the Stephen Dixon Literary Prize and the Louis Azrael Fellowship in Communications. I also wrote very angry essays for the JHU Politik, the campus political magazine. While in college, I freelanced from New Delhi and Baltimore for The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. The former listed my September 2013 essay on electronic dance music and MDMA as an honorable mention on that year's "Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism."
You can read the stuff I’ve written — or at least a selectively curated fraction of it — by clicking on the link in the sidebar to the left (or from the dropdown bar if you're on your phone). I’m also an enthusiastic photographer, if formally and thematically very much an amateur; you can check that out too if you want.
You can reach me at pnashjenkins@gmail.com. I tweet at @pnashjenkins, but prefer Instagram:
