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Ted Scheinman

@scheinman.bsky.social

788 followers 422 following 91 posts

senior editor, smithsonian mag preorder JOLT now: www.simonandschuster.com/books/Jolt… | tedscheinman.com

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

haven't been posting here much BUT some book updates: *we got a kirkus star + rave *scribner dropped a trailer for the book (below!) *fun early notices in lithub, the millions, and beyond *colorful new UK cover *i've finished recording the audiobook PREORDER: bookshop.org/p/books/jolt...

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

first bound galleys of JOLT arrived last night. I wrote most of this book on paper, then spent months in edits staring at pages on a screen, so it’s cool to be back where we started: paper + ink + my whole goofy life laid bare, nbd. preorders open ahem: www.simonandschuster.com/books/Jolt/T...

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

🚨 dream job posting for enterprising audio reporters! 🚨 apply to be a producer on Question Everything, working with the remarkable small team led by Robyn Semien and @brihreed.bsky.social: www.placementtheory.com/jobs/producer

"We're looking for someone with a strong reporting track record in narrative audio, ideally with experience covering some combination of media, tech, law, and politics to create stories and segments that center on sharp, urgent and sometimes unpredictable questions. You should be equally excited to chase stories that you will report and produce, and to produce stories reported by the host and outside contributors.

At Question Everything, we push ourselves to do ambitious, rigorous work. We value sharp editorial judgment, collaboration, curiosity, resilience, and inventiveness. We are looking for someone who can juggle multiple stories, adapt when things change fast, give and receive honest feedback, and who is always on the lookout for angles others miss.

If you don’t check every box on the job description, we still want to hear from you. We’re committed to building a more diverse and inclusive newsroom, and we know great candidates don’t always come from the same path."

"Report and produce stories

Independently report and produce your own stories and segments for the show. Pitch them, research them, chase and book interviewees, conduct interviews and get arresting tape, structure the story, cut the tape, write the script, execute changes through a rigorous editing and fact-checking process, and bring it through to air.

Serve as lead producer on stories reported by Brian, outside contributors, or other staff.

Own all stages of the production process on stories you lead, from idea to publication.

Assess the strength of potential interviewees in pre-interviews. Determine when to kill a story.

Reading deeply and cultivating sources on a beat relevant to our show such as media, tech, AI, politics, free speech and the first amendment."

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

love this thread — not least because when I collected WHCD anecdotes for an old piece, many of the best bits came from @foster.bsky.social about that 2011 dinner! psmag.com/news/careful...

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

big congrats to @lollardfish.bsky.social, whose new book is a fun and zippy read packed with excellent advice ❤️ www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

cover of David M. Perry's 'The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook'

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

if you need a break today, you can read my little tribute to Miles Davis, which opens this month's issue of @smithsonianmag.bsky.social: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...

"At the 1949 sessions later released as Birth of the Cool, the Miles Davis sound emerged: forthright, eloquent and plaintive, as if lamenting that this was the closest you could get, on trumpet, to the human voice. It was urbane, perceptive, always ready but never hurried—in short (to use a word whose full meaning we owe to Davis), it was cool."

"Davis took the wartime sound of bebop and turned down the volume and heat without sacrificing intensity. He’d made a new and beautiful kind of Cold War art, bringing acoustic jazz to such a point of perfection that when he introduced electric guitars, a decade later, many critics—especially Crouch—treated it as the vilest heresy, ever. (They were wrong; Davis’ fusion bands were often brilliant. But so what?)"

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

(sorry)

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

this beautiful book is out today. bravo to @johnlingan.bsky.social. wise readers will purchase two copies — that way you can form a Louie Bellson-style double bass drum! www.simonandschuster.com/books/Backbe...

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

latest jessica winter is great: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all."

"The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.
Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about seventy-five years ago. Much as the Trump Administration does when it vows to revive the coal industry, or when it shares fascist-lite iconography that would be at home in a Paul Verhoeven film, Galloway appeals to the reader’s nostalgia for mid-century “Peak Male.” It was young men, he reminds us, who stormed the beaches at Normandy and who won the Battle of the Bulge: “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach, big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory.” Of course, the German soldiers were young men, too. And it isn’t clear which border Galloway thinks the Russians were crossing, or if he realizes which side they were fighting for."

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

also here is sophie aka squeeps, who will be making regular appearances per @pilgrimdear.bsky.social’s polite encouragements

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 03/10/2023

leave it to meta to remove all wit from jane austen smh www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/t...

"In a WhatsApp text conversation this week, we asked Jane Austen — yes, the 19th-century British author — how she felt about Mr. Darcy, a character from one of her most famous works, “Pride and Prejudice.”

"After a few seconds, Ms. Austen responded.

“Ah, Mr. Darcy. Everyone remembers him as one of my characters,” she said, her face appearing in a small window above our conversation. “But fewer people have read one of my books,” she added, with an arched eyebrow and what seemed like a hint of resentment.

Ms. Austen was not actually talking to us. But a modern interpretation of her likeness was used by Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, as part of an artificially intelligent character that could chat across the company’s messaging apps."

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

surprise visitors today at the offices of smithsonian magazine:

panda statue outside smithsonian mag office

random skeleton inside smithsonian mag office

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 10/08/2023

skimming the inaugural issue of time magazine (march 3, 1923). highlights: mussolini vs. the masons, a secret method of instantly aging wine, and a critic whinging about joyce + eliot ("there is a new kind of literature abroad in our land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand it.")

"Fascismo and the Masons: Press attacks launched against the Masons by the Catholic, Nationalist, and Fascisti parties absorb the attention of all Italians. The Grand Fascista Council, at a meeting in Rome, requested its Masonic members to choose between Fascismo and Freemasonry. A sequel to this "order" was enacted at a meeting of the Rome Municipal Council, at which a motion was presented that only Nationalists, Fascisti, or Liberals not belonging to the Masonic Order should be eligible to fill existing vacancies in the city administration. The motion also included a statement that if for any reason it was found necessary to nominate members of other parties, they should be required to sign a declaration stating on their honor that they were not Freemasons. Mussolini, always against the Masons, has been drawing closer to the Catholic Party. He is becoming almost subservient to the Vatican....." (Time mag, 1923)

"A French professor, Charles Henri, has discovered a method of "aging" wine in a few minutes. In a demonstration before the Academy of Sciences, he took a bottle of new wine, and by placing it for a few minutes in an electrostatic field of from 60,000 to 100,000 volts, changed it in a short time so that in all respects —strength, color, bouquet—it could not be detected from old wine. Steps have been taken to commercialize the new invention." (Time mag, 1923)

"Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?

There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand if. Last year there appeared a gigantic volume entitled Ulysses, by James Joyce. To the uninitiated it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words— many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles—shaken them up in a colossal hat, laid them end to end. To those in on the secret the result represented the greatest achievement of modern letters—a new idea in novels...." (Time mag, 1923)

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Ted Scheinman @scheinman.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

a nice lil mantis has posted up in my car

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