Bill Barich wrote that subcultures exact a terrible price for ambivalence, and certainly the newspaper business is a subculture. Thus, after many years in that racket, mostly at the Los Angeles Times, I quit, moved my family to the Hudson Valley and set out to focus on writing novels and the like. Naturally I spend a lot of my writing other things as well.
In the realm of nonfiction, I seem to specialize in writing about the intersection of money and culture.  For nearly nine years I wrote a monthly column in the Sunday business section of New York Times. I wrote a somewhat similar column back when I was on staff at the LA Times, albeit focused on California. I also worked briefly at the Wall Street Journal covering Hollywood, which was pretty silly. Nowadays I often write essays and reviews for the Journal, and happily enjoy the paper as a reader.  I'm also a contributing editor at the Wilson Quarterly.
I've published three books. My novel The Webster Chronicle was based on the lives of Cotton and Increase Mather, moved up into the 1980s. St. Burl's Obituary, another novel, was about a great fat man who becomes thin and has occasion to reinhabit his former life, unrecognizably to the people who had known him when he was heavy. It was a 1997 PEN/Faulkner finalist. My previous book, Wonder Boy, was the nonfiction account of a wondrous financial fraud that occurred in Southern California. It's a real Eighties story, and was named one of the best books of 1990 by BusinessWeek. I also write an occasional screenplay.
More personally, I am a son of New York but lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, where I found a dentist so good I married her. We have two boys and two cats.