About Eric
The dude on the left.
I’m an Executive Writer at Men’s Health Magazine, where I write two monthly columns (Spitz Take and the Icon Q&A) and occasional features on everything from sex robots to scrotal deodorants. I’ve also been a frequent contributor to magazines like Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Maxim, Billboard, Details, and the New York Times Magazine, among many others. If you’ve read an interview with a celebrity with flawless skin and perfect teeth, it’s not completely implausible that I wrote it.
I’m a contributing editor for The Believer Magazine, where I co-created the popular Sedaratives advice column with Amy Sedaris. It spawned two books, You’re a Horrible Person But I Like You and its sequel Care To Make Love In That Gross Little Space Between Cars, both of which I edited (or co-edited), and both featuring questionable life advice from the likes of Sarah Silverman, Dave Eggers, Louis CK, Judd Apatow, Nick Hornby, and a bunch of other people you’ve probably heard of.
He’s the author of six books, including one that was translated into German and featured a cat on the cover for no apparent reason. Here’s a really disturbing fun fact: The book I wrote that was translated into German? It wasn’t the one about Baywatch and David Hasselhoff! Weird, right?
I also wrote Ron Jeremy’s bestselling autobiography The Hardest (Working) Man In Showbiz, a project that exhausted his literary reserve of penis puns.
I live in Chicago. Even when I’m not living in Chicago, I still tell people I live in Chicago, because in my heart, that’s where I am. I still have Illinois license plates, and always will, not matter where I end up.
I live with my wife Kelly and son Charlie, the latter of whom wants to be a “mad scientist” when he grows up. That’s now in print, so I intend to hold him to it.
Charlie has also developed into something of a songwriter. Here are a few sample lyrics from his latest composition.
Robots, robots
They’re super fast
Robot, robots
They’ve got chocolate brains
Ruuuuuuuun away!
What else can I tell you about me? My favorite record player, maybe?
Well first, there’s the runner up. That would be the record player that my grandparents in Florida owned. It was the size of a bedroom dresser, camouflaged in faded brown wood paneling. I can still remember the first time I tried to use it. It was intimidating, like when I tried to drive my grandparents’ Cadillac Eldorado for the first time in the mid-80s, and everything seemed unnecessarily complicated, with knobs that made a loud thunk when you turned them, but seemed to serve no purpose other than reminding you that you were human and mortal and small. I twisted and pulled at knobs that looked important until something rumbled inside the old beast. The platter started to turn, slowly at first, then gradually gaining speed, purring happily as it realized that, fuck yeah, it could still do this. It still had moves, baby!
But my favorite record player, the one that remains my gold standard, is my first one: A 1974 General Electric V638h 3-speed automatic record player. I loved everything about it; the way it wasn’t quite big enough to comfortably fit a normal-sized LP, or how it folded into a beige suitcase, in case you wanted to bring your music to a picnic or a hootenanny, or the various knobs on the side, including one mysteriously labeled “REJ” which neither my brother or I touched in 18 years, just in case it did something terrible.