Brendan I. Koerner's Blog

A Different Sort of Writing

My relationship with the first-person voice gets a little deeper in the latest issue of Wired, which features my account of going full gonzo in the world of OnlyFans chat specialists. This is probably the most immersive assignment I’ve tackled since my 2010 foray into the culture and science of Alcoholics Anonymous; it also required a lot of emotionally harrowing (albeit darkly comic) reporting about an industry that traffics in the illusion of genuine affection.

The nutshell version of the story is that I got a job impersonating an OnlyFans creator, and thus spent much of my 2024 trying to convince subscribers that I’m a 21-year-old computer-science student who enjoys sushi, Pink Floyd, and masturbating outdoors. It was a bewildering experience at times, to say the least:

I had to wade into several prosaic fantasies about babysitters and office blowjobs, some of which included laughably florid professions of love for me. I couldn’t help but ponder how disappointed these men would be if they could somehow see me sitting in my home office, sipping hibiscus tea as I typed out commands for them to manipulate their genitalia or deposit their semen on certain parts of my body. The most surreal moment came as I noticed the faint sounds of my daughter and her puppy watching Bluey together down the hall, right as a subscriber was waxing poetic about how much he wanted to eat a macaron from between my ass cheeks; the juxtaposition made me question the entire course of my life.

Being something of a Type A weirdo, of course I wanted to be the best at chatting once I started. But as you’ll hopefully see in the piece, I didn’t have the killer instinct necessary to excel. I went in thinking that the job was literary in nature, but really it was all about sales—about establishing emotional connections for the sole purpose of pushing outrageously priced content. My reluctance to embrace that game is why I wouldn’t get far enough with the Glengarry leads.

(Incredible story art by Emily López)

The post A Different Sort of Writing first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

Twelve Years On

A few weeks ago, after a lengthy writing session, I switched my phone off Work mode and noticed that I had a voicemail from an unknown number with a Los Angeles area code. I’ve been noodling with a couple of long-term projects connected to the city of my birth, so I figured it was a callback about one of those ventures. But the message could not have been more unexpected, nor more welcome:

Hey Brendan, this is Alfred Anaya. I’m just calling to tell you I’m out now. I’m at a halfway house here in Hollywood. I’d like to talk to you, man, if you can. I still haven’t learned how to use this phone, so if you call Aimee, she’ll give you the number. I hope you’re good and your family’s good. Talk to you later.

Those words startled me because Alfred, whose story I first wrote about here on Microkhan and later expanded into a Wired feature, wasn’t due to be released from federal prison for a few more years. I was beyond elated that he’d caught a well-deserved break and was now free. But a piece of me couldn’t help but dwell on how I’d failed him.

When I first started working on Alfred’s story a dozen years ago, I was still sussing out what kind of writer I wanted to be. I knew I was drawn to tales of people swept up in extreme circumstances, but I hadn’t devoted enough thought as to why that was the case—I was too busy pinging from one assignment to the next, constantly worried I’d lose my toehold in the industry if I stopped churning out copy. Once I got enmeshed in piecing together what had happened to Alfred, however, I finally paused to contemplate why tragic stories like his get their hooks into me. My chief takeaway was that I’m wired to be moved by narratives in which someone tries to carve out a new life for themselves, only to find that the quintessentially American act of reinvention can have unforeseen and destructive side effects. And because of the way I’ve always viewed myself, I instinctually empathize with the people who fell short of their lofty goals, especially when they were doomed by rash mistakes.

To tell those upsetting stories in a way that honors the trust that sources place in me, I have to get emotionally invested in the labor—often to a point that it’s impossible to maintain a wall between my professional and personal lives. Once a piece is published, how can I move forward when the characters I wrote about must continue to live through the hardships I chronicled? Alfred’s story was the first time I had to deal with that issue in a heavy way. During my reporting, I found that he’d received terrible legal advice, and that the prosecutor had told at least one major lie during the trial. So when Alfred’s family asked me to help them explore what post-conviction remedies might be available to him, my conscience obliged me to do what I could.

And that’s where I fear I fell woefully short of the mark. I studied up on habeas corpus petitions and the clemency process, and I tried to alert influential people to the depth of Alfred’s plight. But in the end, nothing I contributed had any impact on the length of his sentence. And though I know there’s nothing in my job description about serving as an advocate, I still lament how powerless I was to do anything except spin Alfred’s story into a semi-readable format.

That sort of mournfulness has been my constant companion ever since, as I’ve gotten stuck into numerous harrowing stories that I can never quite expunge from my thoughts. I know I need to reorient the way I approach these projects, but I’m afraid to keep things at arm’s length—a big piece of me can’t envision writing anything worthwhile unless I allow myself to be emotionally drained. There are times, however, when I wonder whether I’ve reached the point where I can no longer bear the psychic cost of being close to so much pain.

The upbeat news is that Alfred and I finally managed to connect, and I was heartened by his positive vibes. He’s still trying to figure out a lot of the technology that has emerged over the past decade—the payment options at Target knocked him for a loop—and he’ll have to cut through a bunch of red tape to make it out of the halfway house. But I got choked up listening to him gush about how much he’s looking forward to hanging out with his first grandchild. I could only respond by promising that whatever he needs, I’m here for him.

The post Twelve Years On first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

The Reason That I’m Here

I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several times, my SI subscription made me fall in love with writing as a young’un, and I still recall the weekly thrill of scanning the table of contents in search of a yarn that would teach me something new about the world. The last feature in every issue was always a big swing, of the sort that doesn’t get commissioned any more—a profile of someone who’d touched the darkness during a roller-coaster life, or a snapshot from a corner of America quite unlike my own. Curled up in the corner of my bedroom on a Thursday evening, mere hours after the magazine’s arrival, I’d picture myself out in the field with a tape recorder and a notebook, doing my best to understand the full dimensions of another human for whom sports were everything.

I could’ve chosen a zillion covers to headline this elegaic post, but I had no choice but to pick the one above—the lead-in to a story about a college basketball star who found out the hard way that cocaine isn’t the jovial friend it first appears to be. I know I’ll labor my whole life and never come up with a first line as effective as, “I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine.”

Check out my archive of SI appreciations here. And hope with me that the stories from the magazine’s golden age don’t vanish entirely from The Tubes.

The post The Reason That I’m Here first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

Every Story is a Little Cry of Confusion

I used to resist the first-person voice in my stories at all costs, but no longer: I’ve come to accept that everything I write is at least partly about the personal doubts and fixations that keep me up at night, and there’s really no shame in being frank about that aspect of my work. And so when I was poking around for a way to start my latest Wired feature, about an ex-metalhead from Mexico City who’s become a successful talent manager, I thought to myself: What was the subconscious reason I was attracted to this story in the first place? My ultimate answer was that I’m increasingly uncertain about how to sustain the whole writing gig, and so I want to develop a better understanding of how technology is mutating the business of creation. I chose to make that anxiety explicit in the story’s lead scene, the beginning of which is excerpted above.

But fear not, only a fraction of the story is focused on its teller. There are also less navel-gazey strands about the immigrant experience, the algorithms reshaping our culture, and the work ethic required to achieve even minor fame. I hope you’ll check it out.

The post Every Story is a Little Cry of Confusion first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

Flipping the Perspective

Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the material that’s too conventional or predictable. So I force myself to take a step back and think of some other way into the story, some other theme I should make it my mission to explore.

I’m pretty sure I can trace my embrace of this tactic to something I read in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aside about George Lucas and an experience he had while studying filmmaking at USC.

[Lucas] and a couple of other USC and UCLA students got a Columbia Pictures scholarship to shoot a short documentary on the making of MacKenna’s Gold, which was being shot in Page, Arizona. It was a lumbering, elephantine studio Western, very much in the style of the bloated musicals of the ’60s, and it was Lucas’s introduction to the Old Hollywood. “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing,” he said. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.” While the other students shot conventional “making-of” documentaries, Lucas shot an imagistic film about the beauty of the desert, with the production barely visible in the far distance.

As always, the story worthiest of telling is rarely what’s right in front of your face.

The post Flipping the Perspective first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

The Big Sleep

The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story, which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The piece’s narrative throughline is about an Alaskan researcher who’s dedicated the bulk of her adult life to trying to understand how Arctic ground squirrels power down for two-thirds of every year. But I also make a stab at grappling with how humans might use and misuse the power to turn ourselves off and on at will:

As for myself, what I find most alluring about hibernation is its potential to offer a brief holiday from the constant din of my own thoughts. In a time of exhausting overstimulation, anxiety, and dread, I find myself wondering what it would be like to switch off for a week or two. In his novelization of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke depicted one of his main characters as longing for the psychological liberation of torpor: “Sometimes Bowman, as First Captain of Discovery, envied his three unconscious colleagues in the frozen peace of the Hibernaculum. They were free from all boredom and responsibility.”

If you’re keen to read more about how NASA’s planning to incorporate hibernation tech into Mars missions, I urge you to check out SpaceWorks’ in-depth report on the topic.

The post The Big Sleep first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

The Ultimate Defense Mechanism

A thought I’m frequently comforted by is the realization that most of my fellow humans understand the absurdity of life. It’s a truism that shines through in the jokes people create when there’s nothing outwardly funny about their circumstances. Take, for example, the humorous anecdotes that Soviet citizens crafted under Stalin, a topic explored in this 1957 journal article. Comedy rarely gets much darker:

A peasant on a collective farm, visiting an exhibition, is shown a radio station powerful enough to be heard in foreign countries, even in America. He pleads for permission to speak over the station and is finally given permission to say just one word. Stepping up to the microphone he shouts “Help!” with all the power of his voice. 

I’m now motivated to delve into the literature the jokes that North Koreans tell each other in those rare moments when they’re sure no one’s listening. I refuse to believe that even the most suffocating form of totalitarianism can snuff out our species’ desire for levity.

The post The Ultimate Defense Mechanism first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

The New York Hog Drive of 1849

One of the animating principles of Microkhan is the steadfast belief that the recent past was more chaotic—and thus immeasurably more interesting—than most of us realize. Take, for example, the prevalence of hogs on the streets of New York City in the mid-19th century, the subject of this paper by a pair of Spanish professors. It took a public-health catastrophe—the cholera epidemic of 1849—for municipal officials to realize that the well-inhabited portion of Manhattan wasn’t an ideal stomping ground for our porcine friends. And so the pigs were exiled to what was then the city’s equivalent of Siberia:

Overcoming sometimes violent resistance by impoverished owners, the police flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards that summer…The authorities, moreover, kept up their campaign year after year, banishing from lower Manhattan all bone-boiling works along with the putrefying carcasses piled high in their yards. In the late 1850s, Hog Town was invaded and the west side piggery complex between 50th and 59th Streets dismantled. By 1860, New York´s porkers had been definitively exiled north of 86th Street and transformed into a distinctively uptown menace.

According to the authors, the ejected pigs flourished in Manhattan’s northern hinterlands, under the care of Irish immigrants to who slept rough in what would later become Central Park. If anyone can point me in the direction of documents that detail those swineherds’ experiences, please advise.

The post The New York Hog Drive of 1849 first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

Prepare to Fail

I recently went down the rabbit hole on the history of American bullfighters in Mexico, thanks in large part to this incredibly niche book. One of the characters who jumped out at me was New York native Diego O’Bolger (née James Bolger), who was affectionately profiled in Tucson Weekly some 19 years ago. The story really drives home the physical grind of O’Bolger’s chosen profession, as well as the meager financial rewards on offer for the typical matador. But what stuck out to me the most was this observation about O’Bolger’s pre-fight ritual—a reminder that there’s a subtle ghoulish streak to so many exercises of caution:

After the bulls were assigned, we headed to Elvira’s for chiles rellenos. O’Bolger went back to the hotel. Traditionally, bullfighters don’t eat before a fight. If the worst happens and surgery is required, the doctors don’t want to have to go digging through a lot of tamales and beans to make repairs.

If this is the correct Diego O’Bolger, then I certainly hope he’s enjoying the occasional lunch these days.

The post Prepare to Fail first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.

May the Lighthouses Remain

At the tail end of June, I stopped posting on Twitter. I’d been inching toward that decision for a while, in large part because the space had become so joyless. I realized I was mostly there out of a sense of obligation, or maybe fear—if I wasn’t out their touting my own work, would anyone lay eyes on a single word I ever write? But though my particular line of work seems to demand some sort of constant public presence, I became increasingly convinced that I wasn’t garnering many new readers by, say, briefly opining about old training films. Add in some personal turmoil (including a maddening situation that drew way more attention than I’d bargained for) and I reckoned it was time to step away, at least from the creative end of the equation. (I elected to still reply to people if need be, though it’s rare that someone reaches out to me that way.)

Now that I have a little distance from the rapidly changing app, I do feel a bit nostalgic for those early days in 2007 and 2008—the era when I used Twitter to flag the weird and the wonderful for a handful of my fellow travelers. Accounts that hew to that ethos are still out there, and it’s my hope that they’ll remain as the platform morphs into whatever comes next. For me, the archetype of Twitter perfection is this stream of information about lighthouses, authored by the founder of the Lighthouse Directory. If only Twitter could be filled with millions of accounts that share its spirit, rather than people who seem to revel in sourness above all.

The post May the Lighthouses Remain first appeared on Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner.