Print — Adriane Quinlan

RECENT WRITING FOR CURBED & NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Paul Schrader’s Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living: A sentimental portrait of the filmmaker months after he moved into an assisted-living apartment to stay near his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. This piece made it onto one list of the best writing of 2023.

Tom Sachs Promised a Fun Cult: My editor and I interviewed more than twenty former employees of an artist known for being wacky and weird, but not for being abusive. The piece led Nike to drop Sachs as a designer and the Times turned our reporting into a think piece.

The Noise Next Door: Why are New Yorkers murdering each other over noise complaints? I spoke to a victim’s family, the alleged killer, and the landlord for a piece that gets into the roles of law enforcement and building design.

It’s an indulgence to get paid to write about fabulous real estate, including a synagogue converted into a live-work studio by William Wegman, Jack Sal, and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the West Village studio walled floor-to-ceiling in books by the poet and translator Richard Howard; and the townhome that was the epicenter of a only-in-New-York social circle of Gothic furniture collectors.

I had fun uncovering some real estate mysteries: who would own — then suddenly sell — five units in the same building? Why did two almost identical apartments sell for vastly different prices? And who was selling a condo filled with acting trophies?

ESSAYS + EPHEMERA

Tiny Furniture: I spoke with artists making miniature furniture not for dollhouses, but for collectors, design nerds, and themselves. “It’s like you’re in a dream where everything is out of proportion and shrinking,” one Dutch artist said to me, of the small dioramas she builds from beach trash, which I place in a history that stretches back to Egypt’s ushabtis.

Ode to an Art Teacher: An amateur painter, I had the honor of profiling a master painter just as he was changing his life—quitting his day job during a global pandemic. As one of Thomas Woodruff’s students told me, “You let everything loose and all of a sudden everything comes to you… That’s exactly what I feel is happening to him.”

Blood makes Noise: I wrote for The Believer’s music column about how the pandemic made me more aware of blood—of how diseases travel and eggs implant—in the only piece I wrote in 2020 that was really about what I was feeling: a sudden disinterest in making more blood, more noise, more content. “‘If another journalist says what we do now is more important than ever I’ll scream,’ N says on a Zoom where we can’t think of what to say because we no longer have shared experiences.”

The artist who kept a pandemic diary: I love writing profiles of interesting thinkers and I love writing about the pandemic. I got to do both in a profile of Roni Horn for T. “For Horn, gaining distance is not just a requirement for making art: It’s a method of survival. The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she grew up trying to understand why other Jews in Russia and Hungary had not scrambled to escape the pogroms. ‘You acclimatize to the wrong climate…I don’t want to acclimatize to the wrong weather, and I’ve known that since I was a child.’”

Empty World: My team at VICE spent the winter of 2019/2020 covering a viral outbreak in China, Iran, and Italy as if it was a foreign news story. I tried to pull what we learned into an Adam Curtis-esque documentary essay that aired on March 12, 2020. Later my team gave me a ring that reads “Cassandra.”

Don’t call him prescient: I wrote about maybe the most prescient sculptor of our dystopian era, Tishan Hsu. “Like props built for the Harkonnen den in a ‘Dune’ remake, they seem designed to furnish a future we could not want to live in — a dystopia that may reflect aspects of our reality, but remains enigmatic enough to hide its politics, and grotesque enough to make more squeamish viewers turn away before they’ve had a chance.”

Reading the Barr report with erasure poets: What the document everyone wanted to see means to a generation of poets who pull language from found, government documents. I explained erasure and its new relevance to a VICE audience. “Erasure poems tend to show us how much of our world is made up of redaction: how everything we see, touch, read, wear, and nibble was created through selection by cutting, refracting, withholding, reducing, commercializing, and making smaller from a wider, more complex strata of possibilities.”

John Currin Turns His Gaze to Men: For T, I profiled the painter I’d glorified as a young art student and got to hang out with him in his studio as he worked on a “new series of portraits of female subjects whose smiles are stretched by lines of anxiety, whose eyes blaze with to-do lists.” A dream assignment. Currin even showed me the secrets of his underpainting technique.

The archaeology lab assistant decoding Trump-Russia: To understand the psychological effects of the news cycle in the Trump era, consider an ex-heroin addict who spends 30 hours a week summarizing news lines on Trump for an audience of 75,000. For VICE, I profiled the “Keeper” of Reddit’s “Keep Track” forum. “Sorting through the data of the ancient dead — their pots, their knives, the rocks they cooked on — in order to reconstruct how they lived isn’t so different from tracking the Mueller investigation.”

Mardi Gras for the meme generation: America’s oldest partying tradition, New Orleans Carnival, meets the internet. For Gizmodo, I covered the costume ball of a parading organization inspired by the online aesthetic movement Vaporwave. “Unlike traditional Carnival krewes who toy with aristocracy by plucking debutantes to serve as ‘queens,’ the Krewe of Vaporwave sends up a power structure that does more these days to rule our lives: the power of screens.“

Poets and Programmers: When an Atlanta tech start-up brought in poets to read to their employees, I took a deep dive for LitHub to zoom in on the relationship between poets and corporations, writers and their day jobs, metered verse and marketing lingo. "For Sturm and the poets of his generation, debt feels much more immediate than the idea of a sacrosanct space where poetry lives without interference from corporations…”

Yogurt in Their Hand: I wrote for The Cut about a Page Six typo that I “think about a lot”—a typo that caught Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling “walking together with yogurt in their hand.” I dive into the mystery—were they ever at a 16 Handles?—and what it says about celebrity and the city. “‘Cone or cup?’ I could see some frozen yogurt shop employee asking, in the saddest scene Patti Smith ever envisioned for the East Village.”

The Second City Beneath Our Feet: I took a tour down to Coney Island for The New York Times to hone in on the city’s downtrodden, its overlooked, its stomped and flattened… its shadows. “Beneath your feet, there is a second city. At dawn it grows, it is gone by noon, at dusk it is long and lengthens.”

Beacon in the night: The ultimate sign of our over-stimulated culture? The documentation of neon. “Neon signs flash and blink and blare. They outline leggy dancers; they scream out “LIQUOR”; they direct you toward a hotdog. Yet in hyper-stimulated New York, even things designed to be noticed go unnoticed…“

Flatscreen: An essay for The New York Times on what New York’s soundstages say about the image the city presents to the world, for which I got to interview my true heroes: set designers. “New York is a changeling, a different city to everyone who passes through.” This piece has been copied ten times over, but I was early to the party.

Around the World in Eighty Cokes: I toured Coca-Cola’s headquarters to probe the connection between its displays and its legacy of colonization; between its sugar rush and our hyper-speed culture; between nostalgia and the new, for Lucky Peach magazine. A highlight of my writing from Atlanta, at least according to The Atlantic.

The Cultural History of the Tamagotchi Egg: The origin of my generation’s obsession with the handheld screen begins with a Japanese toy. I took a closer look for Motherboard. “If you picked up a dystopian 19th century novel, paged through it, and found the plot-point where the fictional city’s children were scrambling to get to toy stores to buy a robotic egg that was unable to hatch or reproduce, you would put the novel down. It would just be too painfully obvious a symbol…”

Why Don’t We Appreciate Mother? I visited a museum as overlooked as its subject – New York’s “Museum of Motherhood” – to write for The Believer about our weird relationships with Mommy Dearest. “New York is a city of places to run from your mother—including but not limited to strip clubs, racecourses, and a bar called Mother’s Ruin (18 Spring Street)…”

New York Without a Net: If it’s egomaniacal to call this prescient, so be it. In the summer of 2009 I spent a week in New York without a cell phone or the internet to write for The New York Observer about my generation’s then-unique addiction. The challenge: to live as one would have in the year of my birth. Harder than it looks.

Leech, Meet Patient: I can’t prove it - but this may be the inspiration for a plotline on “30 Rock” where Jenna’s fame convinces her to follow a leech facial. I did the same—only, as a gonzo cub reporter—as I suffered through a modern day leeching for The New York Times. The only time I’ve ever literally bled to file.

The Night We Sneaked Into the Center of the World: Another essay for The Awl – this one on China, the Olympics, and the borderland between spectacle and loneliness as embodied by finding oneself in a stadium after dark “feeling like marbles that had been dropped in a funnel and had rolled, powerlessly, toward what had drawn us in.”

PR for the PRC: Working for China’s Ministry of Propaganda was my entrance to the news biz. I wrote about the flavor of censorship for N+1.

LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS

The afterlife of Clay Shaw: On the only man ever indicted for JFK’s assassination, and what it did to him, written for A1 of The Times-Picayune’s assassination package. The story Oliver Stone ignored. And the 2nd place winner of the 2014 Louisiana/Mississippi Associated Press Media Editors (APME).

How a Lynda Benglis sculpture sat, for 30 years, in a Louisiana sewage plant: A lush, dark avant-garde work sits in a smiley and sunny suburban city, ignored. This Times-Picayune story got national attention and led to private funding that would see the sculpture displayed again in New Orleans’ City Park. (Go visit for me!)

In the seven nights before New Orleans’ smoking ban kicked in, I visited seven bars for The Times-Picayune to document the end of a scene, and to describe a timeless tradition: a beer and a cigarette, imbibed simultaneously from atop a bar stool. Night 1, Night 2, Night 3, Night 4, Night 5, Night 6, Night 7. This series sparked on social media and generated a typoon of feedback from divided readers.

Who is that recluse in the ranch house, the one with the billion-dollar inheritance? That time I went to Texas for The Times-Picayune to learn everything I could about the secretive woman who was set to inherit the Saints team. This required a bit of sports, a bit of business, a bit of probing through municipal files – and a bit of old-fashioned sleuthing. Spoiler alert: I found her.

The Guardian of Death in the City of Death: Profiling a man who served in public office for 40 years – and who survived through regular scandals – is harder than it looks. Herein, I profile New Orleans’ longest-serving and most eccentric Coroner, famed locally for playing the trumpet in his white suit and alligator boots. The piece swings from nuns to meth addicts, from racial strife to police murders, as quickly as life swings in this city. Editors note: I pulled this off with a 48-hour deadline.

Nearly a decade after Hurricane Katrina hit the Lower 9th Ward: A legacy of loud, media-driven change and the lasting silence of high weeds and torn-up houses. The story ran on A1 for the storm’s 9th anniversary. “She sat inside her home while a block away, a group of teenage girls stood at the levee wall, shifting their weight from foot to foot and listening to a guide talk long.’They take pictures of the wall like it’s the Great Wall of China,’ Parker said. ‘Leave us alone, already.’”

How the unsolved murder of one woman, 50 years ago, still haunts New Orleans: Mary Sherman’s murder has been pored over by JFK assassination buffs. But they never had the police file… until now. And yes, if you’re asking – I’m still getting e-mails from curious conspiracy theorists over this piece.

A Church Reopens after Katrina: “It was a discordant odor, lingering from parties held in the hall on the preceding Saturday evenings, with their bows and bunting and boozy joy.“

50 years after plane crash left no survivors, a legacy still remains: How local legend swirled around a plane that crashed under mud in Lake Pontchartrain, to be never fully recovered. This was a one-day story, which is 50-percent of the reason why I’m still proud of it.

Comedian, consigliere, politician: My intimate profile of a beloved, small-town mayor – and everything about Louisiana politics that his career has embodied.

LIFE IN ATLANTA

A dead mall on its busiest day: I talked to shoppers, workers, and wanderers at one mall on one day to paint a portrait of the decline of American malls for The New York Times that featured my photos. “In wingtip shoes and a fedora, James Eldridge unfolded The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and proceeded to read it, back to front…”

Welcome to Creflo Dollar Highway: I walked the length of a storied road talking to nearly everyone I passed for Creative Loafing. ”Ride this route and see a slice of American weirdness, American ingenuity, and American poverty, bookended by two Waffle Houses.”

Your futile, last chance: A first-person essay on taking a police department course on how to survive a mass shooting. “We had tried to keep positive and take notes while we watched videos with audio of women screaming and read bar graphs that showed the ‘percentage of the dead’…”

The shooting of an unarmed veteran: I painted moments in a protest scene for Creative Loafing. “Bishop, who is 63 and served in the war in Vietnam, still walks like a soldier — shoulders back, head up. But when he saw Bridget Anderson, he slouched and his eyes began to water…”

MISC. PROFILES

The Pastel Dream of the Developer The Washington Post

A Real Life Comic-Book Superhero Newsweek

Liu Bolin at the World Trade Center The New York Times

Eva, Queen of the Russians The New York Times

That’s Mark Jenkins All Over The Washington Post

Wells Tower, Neighborhood Dude The Greenpoint Gazette

A Busy Day for Nuptials Across New York State The New York Times

The Ultimate Clock Watcher The New York Times

The Man Who Would Love Rocks The New York Times

SCENES + THE SILLY

Photo Essay: At the Beach, Vulnerability and Confidence The New York Times