Seth Abramson​​

SUMMARY

 

Over a 30-year career in higher education, publishing, criminal investigation, journalism, the arts, and the law, Seth Abramson (MA, MFA, JD, Ph.D.) has worked at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Wesleyan University, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, the Institute of Art & Design at New England College, University Press of New England, the Committee for Public Counsel Services’ Boston Trial Unit, and the New Hampshire Public Defender’s Nashua Trial Unit. He’s also been self-employed, including as the co-owner and co-chairman of an education consulting corporation (Abramson Leslie LLC), the sole proprietor of two media outlets (Proof and Retro), and an indie-record publisher (Live Free or Die Records).

 

A Dartmouth College (AB), University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA), Harvard Law School (JD), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD) graduate, and an attorney in good standing with both the New Hampshire Bar Association and The Federal Bar for the District of New Hampshire, Seth is a retired University of New Hampshire professor who taught journalism, mass communications, legal advocacy, rhetoric, composition, cultural theory, creative writing, technical writing, and literature at the R1 (“very high research activity”) university level for fifteen years. He’s also a New York Times–bestselling Donald Trump and Elon Musk biographer and a Poetry Foundation–bestselling poet. He’s published 21 books in four genres, including five “Best American” anthologies, and has received honors for both his creative writing and his journalism.

 

Before and after the Trump administration, Seth worked as a professional art critic and columnist, writing for such publications as the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Kansas City Star, the Seattle Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Boston Review, HuffPost, The Philadelphia Review of Books, Indiewire, and Poets & Writers.

 

During the Trump administration, Seth was a regular contributor to CNN and the BBC, as well as a Newsweek columnist. In 2018 he was named to the National Council for the Training of Journalists’ list of “most respected journalists” in the United States and United Kingdom—one of only ten freelancers from either country so honored.

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He authors two Substack publications ranked in the Top 40 worldwide in their subject categories: Proof (Politics) and Retro (History). At various points, both have been ranked in the global Top 5.

As the songwriter Hounds, he has released 35 full-length albums and three EPs under that nom de plume, and runs a newly founded music substack, Hounds. You can find Hounds on Spotify here, at YouTube Music here, and at Apple Music (iTunes) here. Hounds has ascended as high as the Top 1% of all musicians on Spotify by monthly listenership. Find Seth at Bluesky here, at Twitter here, and at Threads here.

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FULL BIOGRAPHY

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In late 2008, Seth and Iowa Writers’ Workshop classmate Nathaniel Minton, then a regular in the fiction section of McSweeney’s and the co-screenwriter of The Plague (starring James Van der Beek and Ivana Miličević), developed the idea of writing an autobiography so over-the-top that its readers would presume it to be a deception—even if every word were accurate. Minton made a first attempt at this, and was promptly banned from a nonfiction workshop run by the novelist Ed Carey, who was sure Minton’s memoir was in fact fiction (a genre disallowed in the workshop).

 

After Seth began his research into metamodernism in 2013, just a year before he introduced the Daytime Emmy and Teen Choice Award-winning actor Shia LaBeouf to this post-postmodern cultural philosophy—nearly destroying LaBeouf’s career in the process (read the full story here, and Seth’s literary collage of a cease-and-desist letter from LaBeouf’s attorney at HuffPost, here—he realized the utility of such an experimental bio lay beyond mere puckishness. A bio of this sort helps establish that in the digital age it little matters what one says about oneself, as no one will ever see all one says on the subject and, in any case, strangers will think whatever they like about you whether it comports with the truth or not. “No one’s a human being to anyone else on the internet,” post-reality theorist and Abramson associate Jesse Damiani once said. And he’s right.

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With this in mind, Seth started putting “anti-blurbs” on the back covers of his published books of poetry. The worse the verbal depredation someone had heaped upon Seth’s head, the more likely it was he’d make it public. He knew the actual content of his character had become immaterial online—where he was a stranger to everyone, and everyone to him—such that he could explain in advance why his bio featured too-earnest oversharing (and statements from relative strangers who wrongly believed they knew him) and critics would still accuse him of being senseless to how he was making himself appear to others. By the mid-2010s Seth had nothing left to hide; that is, had he ever had any interest in dissembling. After all, the back cover of his poetry collection DATA documented both his penis size and his HDL cholesterol, among other sensitive medical data.

 

Seth had taken to heart the words of proto-metamodernist David Foster Wallace—a novelist he would later teach as a professor and be contracted to publish essays about by A24 Films—who wrote the following of the coming digital age in the latter months of 1992:

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The next real literary “rebels” might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.

 

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of over-credulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

 

Though DFW couldn’t have known it at the time, his words presaged the concept of the self-aware “LOLcow.” Guided by these words, Seth resolved, starting in 2014, that he would never fear being ridiculed for showing his imperfect self or for believing earnestly in single-entendre principles. Yet such radical sincerity was an absurd ambition, given his lifelong near-clinical ultra-sensitivity. He’d once been told by a therapist that he was at the opposite end of the spectrum from sociopathy, as his lifelong struggle has been to regard himself independent from the perspectives of others.

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Once Seth exited his Foster Wallace phase—all do—he realized that a metamodern autobiography had considerably more utility than just serving as a “proof-of-concept” for the dominant cultural philosophy of the digital age: it underscored that each component of our lives should be precious to us, and that we should have the courage to share with others all we value or take pride in, with “value” defined as not merely what pleases us but what we know has shaped us. It was during this stage of his evolution as a metamodernist that Seth began giving lectures to undergrad creative writing students encouraging them to use in their own writing the same metamodern techniques Seth had used to detail his autobiography in the poetry collections of his Metamodern Trilogy: Metamericana (2015), DATA (2016), and Golden Age (2017).

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Under 200 people ever read those works. But the idea of a metamodern autobiography survived.

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A graduate of Harvard Law School, Seth worked for nine years as a criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator before returning to school to receive two additional terminal degrees, after which he joined the tenure-track undergraduate faculty of the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at University of New Hampshire, the State of New Hampshire’s flagship R1 public university. Seth taught at the university’s College of Professional Studies in the Professional and Technical Communications, Digital Language Arts, Engineering Technology, and Literary Studies programs; his areas of academic specialization included, among others, digital journalism, post-internet writing, cultural theory, and legal advocacy (legal writing, case method, trial advocacy).

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Seth is an attorney in good standing with the New Hampshire Bar Association and the Federal Bar for the District of New Hampshire; a former longtime member of the American Bar Association, New Hampshire High Tech Council, and the National Council of Teachers of English; a former culture columnist and art critic at Indiewire, political essayist at Newsweek, and data journalist at Poets & Writers; and both a New York Times–bestselling nonfiction author and Poetry Foundation-bestelling poet.

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Trained as a criminal investigator at Georgetown University (1996) and Harvard University (2000-2001), Seth worked for four public defenders between 1996 and 2007 (three state, one federal), representing over 2,000 indigent criminal defendants during that time in cases that ranged from juvenile delinquency to first-degree murder. He first testified in federal court as a federal criminal investigator for the Georgetown Criminal Justice Clinic (one of the two federal public defender organizations in Washington, D.C.) at the age of 19; represented his first homicide client at age 22 (as a Rule 33 attorney for the Boston Trial Unit of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, or CPCS); and had won a first-degree murder jury trial for the New Hampshire Public Defender by the age of 29—still the youngest Granite Stater to do so this century. He began his legal career without losing either a bench or jury trial for two years.

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After working for CPCS on major felonies—termed non-concurrent felonies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—in Boston Municipal Court and Dorchester District Court in 1999 and 2000, Seth represented misdemeanor clients in Roxbury District Court through the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute from 2000 to 2001. Between 2001 and 2007, he was a Staff Attorney for the Nashua Trial Unit of the New Hampshire Public Defender, working misdemeanor and felony cases in New Hampshire district courts as well as the two Superior Courts in Hillsborough County (the Southern District and the Northern District).

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Seth supervised many professional criminal investigators at the New Hampshire Public Defender, including a former New Hampshire State Police trooper, the Investigations Bureau Chief for the New Hampshire Office of Professional Licensure and Certification, a retired USPS agent, and a professional photographic documentarian. At the Criminal Justice Institute in Massachusetts, Seth coordinated his own investigations, drawing from his education, training, and experience in the nation’s capital.

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In New Hampshire, Seth worked alongside his colleagues to strategize criminal investigations in particularly thorny cases. Among those Seth aided in forming their investigative strategies was a future Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Connecticut Office of the Attorney General, a future prosecutor for the Merrimack (NH) Police Department, and a future New Hampshire Superior Courts judge, as well as private criminal defense attorneys and of-counsel NGO lawyers now working across the United States.

 

A 1998 graduate of Dartmouth College (A.B., English), Seth returned to school after his time at the New Hampshire Public Defender and received additional terminal degrees in Creative Writing (MFA, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2009) and English (MA, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016).

 

At University of Iowa, Seth was selected to run the Undergraduate Writers’ Workshop—widely considered one of the most competitive application-only college writing workshops in operation, given the status of the university’s Writers’ Workshop as at once the first, the oldest, and the most celebrated terminal creative writing degree program in the world.

 

After he joined the undergraduate tenure-track faculty of the College of Professional Studies at University of New Hampshire—ranked the #11 Public Liberal Arts College in the United States by U.S. News & World Report—Seth co-directed CPS’s 2015 transition into departments, and its English program into Digital Language Arts and Professional & Technical Communications degrees in the college’s new Department of Communication Arts & Sciences. These degrees covered topics ranging from digital journalism to technical writing, legal advocacy to post-internet literary and cultural theory, graphic novels to nonfiction writing, all subjects Seth taught at various points as a professor.

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Seth’s “Digital Creative Writing” course, designed to focus on entrepreneurial white papers for high-concept digital projects rather than conventional print-published literary art, became the first workshop of its kind in the United States in 2016—one that focused on poetics (a key concern in Seth’s doctoral research) rather than aesthetics, and meta-workshopping (the question of how we choose what to write and how we understand what we read) rather than conventional line editing.

 

Seth also co-founded, in 2016, University of New Hampshire’s Legal Advocacy Program, in which he created courses in legal writing and research—most notably, a pre-law course reproducing law school study for undergraduates—and a criminal justice-oriented professional writing course whose curriculum focused on the procedures and policies of the U.S. criminal justice system (as well as a panoply of legal advocacy skills, such as direct examination and cross-examination, how to write client letters and legal memoranda, opening statements and closing arguments, how to analyze police reports, and how to structure legal research papers).

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In 2018, Seth was Affiliate Faculty at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. In 2019, he was Affiliate Faculty at the Institute of Art & Design at New England College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

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Seth has been a print and radio journalist since 1994, when at age seventeen he became a sports reporter at The Daily Dartmouth, America’s oldest college newspaper, running print coverage of Dartmouth’s Division I (FCS) football team, the Big Green. This stint began, unfortunately, just a few weeks after the team lost its star QB—Jay Fiedler, future five-year Miami Dolphins starter—to the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League as a draft pick. The remainder of the team wasn’t good, though it included talented defensive back Matt Burke, who Seth spent many Sundays watching the New England Patriots with, and who would later himself end up in the NFL as a coach with not just the Dolphins and Eagles but the Detroit Lions, Cincinnati Bengals, New York Jets, and Arizona Cardinals. Burke is now the Defensive Coordinator for the Houston Texans.

 

Seth also served for years as a lead radio (color) correspondent for Dartmouth’s Division I men’s college basketball. During the period Seth called basketball games for the Big Green, a quarter of the Ivy League achieved Top 25 status in the national Associated Press rankings (University of Pennsylvania as high as #21, and Princeton University as high as #8) while the League as a whole attained “mid-major” conference status in basketball for the first time in decades, peaking at #14 out of over thirty conferences nationwide.

 

Seth’s work in radio at Dartmouth also included a weekly sports-talk roundtable and an hours-long music block (for which he was the DJ) focusing on American and British psychedelia from 1965 to 1972. 

 

Since leaving college, Seth’s reporting and editorials have been published in both American and British media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Kansas City Star, The Seattle Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Newsweek, Boston Review, The Philadelphia Review of Books, VRScout, and SBNation (for whom he covered Division I FBS college football, specifically the University of Wisconsin’s Badgers, one of the charter members of the Big Ten Conference).

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In the 2010s, Seth was, with PEN/Bingham Award-nominated novelist Chris Leslie-Hynan, the Chairman of an education consulting LLC, Abramson Leslie Consulting. Abramson Leslie worked with aspiring novelists, poets, and memoirists to help prepare them for graduate study in their respective fields—creating a model for one-on-one arts mentorship (a model particularly suitable for non-traditional students who had received little manuscript guidance while in school) that was unprecedented at the time. The LLC was incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the contractors it hired were all terminal-degree-holding professional writers with significant creative writing experience, publishing credits, and pedigrees.

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From 2004 to 2006, Seth ran a media outlet focused on American politics, The Nashua Advocate, whose 2005 nomination for a Koufax Award (and coverage in Rolling Stone for its reporting on the 2004 “Gannongate” scandal within the George W. Bush administration and White House press corps) led to him appearing regularly as a commentator on Air America Radio. While in 2005 The Nashua Advocate became the first-ever blog listed as a news outlet on Google News, the outlet lost this designation due to public complaints and a write-in campaign organized by far-right pundit Michelle Malkin and readers of her website. The listing of blogs on Google News would later become commonplace, and indeed Proof occasionally shows up in such searches. 

 

From 2008 to 2013, Seth was a reporter and data journalist for Poets & Writers, where he had sole responsibility for the only comprehensive national rankings of graduate (MFA) programs in Creative Writing in the United States. From 2013 to 2016 he was an art critic, culture columnist, and regular reviewer of television, film, and other multimedia at Indiewire. His TV reviews were picked up by major review-aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where he retains his “legacy critic” status. From 2010 to 2017, Seth was a columnist and editorialist at HuffPost (now a division of Buzzfeed News), where his research and writing on American politics was shared via social media over two million times during the 2016 presidential primaries. From March 2017 through Election Day 2020, Seth’s tweets (on his “@sethabramson” Twitter feed) were retweeted over 100 million times.

 

In January 2023, Politico identified a 56-tweet thread published by Seth in October 2017 as one of the five dozen events in Twitter history that permanently “changed [U.S.] politics.” The magazine cited him as one of the American social media users most responsible for the “rise of the Twitter thread.”

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All told, Seth has 1.5 million followers across several social media platforms. Among his current and former followers on social media are several of The Avengers (the actors portraying Captain America, Ms. Marvel, The Vision, and The Hulk, for instance); several West Wing cast members (Richard Schiff, Bradley Whitford, and Josh Malina); Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; U.S. senator Mitt Romney (from his “Pierre Delecto” sock-puppet account, which followed only a hundred or so feeds in total); 2016 Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos, who made Seth one of his first follows on Twitter; celebrities including Ricky Gervais, Mark Hamill, John Legend, Seth Rogen, Ed Norton, Anna Kendrick, QuestLove, Dan Harmon, Courtney Love Cobain, Wil Wheaton, LeVar Burton, Grimes, Elijah Wood, Deepak Chopra, Jeff Daniels, James Corden, Sarah Silverman, Cher, and hundreds of others; and too many major-media journalists to name, from Nicolle Wallace to George Stephanopoulos, Erin Burnett to Chuck Todd, Jim Sciutto to Chris Cuomo, Stephanie Ruhle to Kristen Welker, Van Jones to Ronan Farrow, Bill Kristol to S.E. Cupp. At various points Seth came tantalizingly close to finding a partner for turning his Proof Series of political nonfiction books into a multi-season “true crime” series; Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot and Homecoming) and Rob Reiner (A Few Good Men and The American President) have expressed interest. Multimedia rights for the 3,000-page, national-bestselling now-pentalogy are available.

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Seth is represented by Jeff Silberman of Los Angeles-based Folio Literary Management.

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After the election of Donald Trump in late 2016, Seth became both a Newsweek political columnist and a regular commentator on U.S. politics on CNN and the BBC, with additional interviews by (among many others) CBS, CBS Radio, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Radio, ABC News, ABC Radio, NPR, PBS, the CBC, HBO, Bloomberg, the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Politico, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Congressional Quarterly, Playboy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Der Spiegel, the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Sunday Times (UK), Slate, Roll Call, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the “Under the Skin” pod with Russell Brand, various political programs on SiriusXM Radio, and many others.

 

Seth was the featured interviewee on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher (a week after Salman Rushdie and a week before Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff), and the featured monthly interview in Playboy (between Sam Harris of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” and Tarana Burke of the #MeToo movement). In the late 2010s, Seth gave what was then—and will likely remain—the shortest interview in the history of Playboy, an exchange with essayist and Esquire writer-at-large Luke O’Neil about social media platforms that exclusively comprised a number (“42”). He separately spoke with Virginia Heffernan for the above-referenced Playboy feature.

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Besides Brand, Maher, and Heffernan, Seth has been interviewed by everyone from ex-Trump attorney Michael Cohen to former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Mediaite owner and former MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams to Pulitzer Prize finalist and deputy editorial page editor for the Washington Post Ruth Marcus. In 2018, he declined to be interviewed by Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker for a feature article; he also declined both an invitation from Tucker Carlson to appear on Fox News and several approaches from the Kremlin-controlled RT network—which has since made a habit of castigating him on TV and in digital reports. He’s faced lawsuit threats from Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, longtime Trump confidant and political adviser Roger Stone, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Trump National Security Advisory Committee deputy chair J.D. Gordon, and individuals close to Trump attorney Sidney Powell, pillow salesman/recovering drug addict Michael Lindell, and Stop the Steal co-founder Ali Alexander. A convicted antisemitic terrorist—one sung about in a Donald Glover song—once put a digital fatwa on Seth on the dark web. Seth has received death threats of both domestic and foreign origin, including one that required contacting the FBI and another that hailed from Saudi Arabia. The New York Post identified him, via a March Madness-style bracket, as one of the 32 leading American critics of the first presidential administration of Donald Trump (2017 to 2021).

 

His political writing and research was widely cited in TV, radio, print and online in the Trump era, with discussions on CBS, CBC, CNBC, PBS, NPR, Fox News and BET, as well as Politico, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Chicago Tribune, The Weekly Standard, The New Yorker, Vibe, People, Vox, The Hill, The New York Post, The Times of Israel, The Week, and many others.

 

Ellen McCarthy of The Washington Post has written that Seth attained “prominence in the collective American consciousness” as a result of Donald Trump’s first administration.

 

The New York Times has quoted Seth’s work as an Elon Musk biographer as being the first research to advance the idea that Musk isn’t, in fact, a genius, and that his IQ likely sits “between 100 and 110,” as there’s “zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.”

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Another recent citation of Seth’s journalism came with the number-one New York Times bestseller Oath and Honor, published by Little, Brown, and Company and Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney (R)—a member of the House January 6 Committee—in 2023. During the time the HJ6C was sitting in 2022, it both contacted Seth for his input and cited his work in its congressional publications. Seth’s name also appears in the private data stolen by the FSB from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton during the Trump-Russia scandal, which data was thereafter published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks.

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In October 2018, the National Council for the Training of Journalists named Seth, as a freelance journalist, to its annual roster of the “most-respected journalists” in the United States and the United Kingdom. Voted on by British journalists, the NCTJ list featured only ten freelancers; other journalists honored by the NCTJ in 2018 included Pulitzer Prize winners Bob Woodward and Ronan Farrow and Emmy- and Murrow Award-winning CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour.

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In November 2018, Simon & Schuster published Seth’s New York Times and USA Today bestselling book on Trump-Russia collusion, Proof of Collusion, which took readers through four decades of Trump’s ties to Russia, with a particular emphasis on the events of the 2016 presidential election.

 

The 450-page book contained 1,650 endnotes and 2,000 major-media citations.

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In September 2019, Macmillan published Proof of Conspiracy, Seth’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly-bestselling book on the transnational pre-election geopolitical conspiracy—centered on the Middle East—that helped Trump win the White House.

 

Also a national bestseller at Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes (and attached to an online archive of over 3,250 endnotes and 4,330 major-media citations), the 600-page Proof of Conspiracy chronicled the so-called “Red Sea Conspiracy,” the plot by which the leaders of Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates conspired to assist Donald Trump in becoming President of the United States.

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In September 2020, Macmillan published Proof of Corruption, the third book in the Proof Trilogy. The book focused on Trump bribery scandals involving the COVID-19 pandemic, the presidential election of 2020, Ukraine, China, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela, along with major updates on earlier Trump scandals involving Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Proof of Corruption was a USA Today bestseller, as well as making pre-order and post-release national bestseller lists at Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Books-A-Million, and Walmart.

 

Its archive of roughly 5,000 major-media citations is now free online at www.sethabramson.net.

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In October 2020, Seth released Proof: A Pre-election Special, a limited-series podcast co-hosted by former Vice editor Thomas Morton and Produced by Cineflix. A 10-episode explainer of key facts from the epic Proof trilogy—unpacking some of its most shocking revelations across a dozen hours of audio—the podcast reached Apple Podcasts’ Top 10 in the Government category in 31 countries, including the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the UAE. The podcast reached the Top 5 in 24 of these countries, and the top two spots in a dozen (the United States, Canada, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Romania, Singapore, and South Africa). In all, episodes of the podcast were downloaded or listened to 100,000 times in the weeks immediately preceding the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

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In January 2021, Seth founded Proof, a 14-section media outlet on Substack that became the top-ranked Culture substack in the world within its first 120 days of operation, and is now ranked in the Top 40 of Substack’s newly developed U.S. Politics section. In 2022, Proof published the fourth book in the Proof series, Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection. The 250-page book, which focuses on events leading up to the armed attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been read by tens of thousands of readers from around the world. According to internal Substack data, Proof has subscribers in every state and in 172 of 195 foreign countries.

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In 2024 and 2025, Seth published two more books in the national-bestselling Proof Series: Proof of Cruelty: Donald Trump’s Decades of Violence (2024) and Proof of Devilry: The Crimes of Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein (2025).

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You can find Proof at sethabramson.substack.com.

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In October 2021, Seth founded Retro, another media outlet published via Substack. Retro covers music, TV, film, books, memes, video games, toys, and a host of other arts-and-culture-oriented topics, with a special emphasis on “vintage” cultural phenomena. Retro is ranked among the Top 40 History substacks in the world, and has been particularly noted in major media for its 2021 coverage of multimillion-dollar scandals plaguing the sealed-and-graded collectibles industry.

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You can find Retro at retrostack.substack.com.

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Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October 2022, Seth immediately became interested in the Tesla CEO’s emerging role as a political influencer, provocateur, and kingmaker. He began writing a biography of Musk, and by December 2022 an “Elon Musk” section had been added to Proof. By the end of 2024, Seth had written and published the equivalent of two biographies of Musk, including, as an ebook, Proof of Destruction: The Musk Insurrection As It Happened (2025).

 

Seth’s biographical research and writing on Musk came to national attention just as the second Trump administration was forming. His approach to Muskology broke with the hagiographical bent of nonfiction concerning the man (e.g., in recent biographies by Ashlee Vance and Walter Isaacson) by way of determining him to be a pathological liar and therefore an unreliable source.

 

While major media’s first treatment of Seth as a Musk biographer with a fresh take on the world’s richest man came in August 2024, via a report by Newsweek on an online spat between Seth and Musk over whether Musk had refused to remotely disable a new Cybertruck held by a Chechen warlord who claimed Musk had gifted it to him—during the spat Musk called Seth a “retard,” only to later reveal that, contrary to his claims throughout the dispute, he indeed did have the power to control Cybertrucks remotely—it wasn’t until January of 2025 that media the world over began frantically seeking experts on Musk’s recent forays, online and off, into U.S. and global politics.

 

In early 2025, news reports in The Daily Beast, CNBC, Yahoo News, Ars Technica, Politico, The New York Times, The Mirror (UK), The International Business Times, The Economic Times, The Times of India, The Mary Sue, The Daily Mail (UK), The Wrap, Pravda (Ukraine), and NDTV covered Seth’s reporting on many topics related to Musk: his apparently declining mental health; questions about his IQ; the aforementioned scandal in Chechnya; his June 2025 online feud with Trump; his attempts to rig Grok to force it to give right-coded responses to queries; and the entrepreneur’s puzzling appearance at a Mar-a-Lago dinner intended to include only Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the latter a key rival in the arena of private spaceflight and the ongoing competition to be the world’s richest man.

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Since the start of the second Trump administration, Seth has been in extremely high demand as a Musk biographer, fielding interview requests from domestic and international media outlets such as the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Forbes, CTV, Sky News, The Times of London, The Sunday Times, Times Radio (UK), The Daily Beast, Polygon, Techcrunch, Cuomo on NewsNation, Choice Words with Samantha Bee (podcast), The Morning Meeting (a podcast hosted by former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, former ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin, and the former chief of staff to Democratic Colorado governor Jared Polis, Dan Turrentine), The Sun (UK), The Telegraph (UK), NTV Media (Russia), 7 News (Australia), Television Programme Piazzapulita (Italy), Veja Magazine (Brazil), The Irish Star (Ireland), El Confidencial (Spain), i24news (Israel), Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italy), the Leeds International Festival of Ideas, Interesting Engineering, KSHP 107.1 FM Las Vegas, WORT 89.9 FM Madison (WI), and others. He’s now working with a UK production studio on a feature-length documentary about Elon Musk’s personal, professional and political radicalization this century.

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In Q2 2025, international coverage of Seth’s work as a Musk biographer, likely spurred in part by the acknowledgment by the New York Times of his status in this regard, bloomed, with coverage in La Razón (Spain), Verdens Gang (Norway), Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Blick (Switzerland), Folder (Croatia), Index (Croatia), Der Standard (Austria), Lettera 43 (Italy), The Telegraph (UK), El Tiempo (Colombia), Onet (Poland), Jeux Video (France), Auto Świat (Poland),
Visão (Portugal), Noticias Carocol TV (Colombia), Nyheterna TV 4 (Sweden), Z News (Vietnam), and others around the world.

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Seth’s first discrete biography of Musk, the aforementioned Proof of Destruction, was published in February 2025 and is officially the sixth book in the bestselling Proof Series.

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Seth’s second biography of Musk, Proof of Devolution: The Long Hard Fall of Elon Musk, will focus on the entrepreneur’s pre-Trump life, and will be published in 2026. The planned Musk Trilogy will conclude with a third book currently scheduled for publication in late 2026 or early 2027.

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In the mid-2010s, Seth co-founded—and for a decade thereafter was the co-series editor for—an annual anthology of experimental writing encompassing every literary genre and various hybrid genres, Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press). From 2017 to 2019, Seth was editorial director of the New Hampshire city newspaper The Manchester Independent. Prior to his co-founding of the Best American Experimental Writing series, Seth co-founded and was poetry editor for The New Hampshire Review (2004-05). He has also served on the editorial staff at the University Press of New England (1994-98), The Iowa Review (2008-09), Crazyhorse (2009), and Devil’s Lake (2009-11), the last of these a University of Wisconsin-Madison publication.

The fifth edition of Best American Experimental Writing, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, was published by Wesleyan University Press at the end of 2020.

 

Guest editors for the BAX series have included such celebrated authors as National Book Award finalists Carmen Machado, Cole Swensen and Douglas Kearney; winner of the Bollingen Prize, Charles Bernstein; and Guggenheim Fellowship recipients Joyelle McSweeney and Tracie Morris.

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Writing isn’t the only skillset that Seth has been asked to judge, however. Along with acting as a first, second, and final reader for university creative writing contests around the country, Seth has been a judge for such events as the National Moot Court Competition, an Illinois poetry slam hosted by Marc Smith—inventor of “slam poetry”—and an international contest for aftermarket game developers for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, the Byte-Off.

 

His historical research into the wild history of Atari 2600 and NES homebrews at Retro has been accepted for inclusion in the archive of this data organized by the archivist for Atari Inc., the 21st-century corporate incarnation of legendary 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s video game developer Atari.

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Seth’s expertise isn’t only focused on past events. He’s also worked as a professional consultant

on futurist projects aimed at determining likely medium- and long-term outcomes for the United States, and he’s also spoken with key media and political figures on this topic, from Van Jones of CNN to former White House Press Secretary Anthony Scaramucci. He’s been invited to lecture on AI at University of Southern California and on the future of urban architecture at University of Michigan.

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Since 2009 Seth has authored or edited 21 books, such as An Insider’s Guide to Graduate Degrees in Creative Writing (reference, Bloomsbury, 2018); Golden Age (poetry, BlazeVOX, 2017); DATA (poetry, BlazeVOX, 2016); Metamericana (poetry, BlazeVOX, 2015); Thievery (poetry, University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Prize; Northerners (poetry, Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize and a Poetry Foundation–bestselling collection; and The Suburban Ecstasies (poetry, Ghost Road Press, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Many Mountains Moving Prize. An unpublished seventh collection of poetry, Superhumanism, was previously a semifinalist for the renowned Brittingham Prize.

 

Additional literary awards given to Seth’s creative writing include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry, a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the August Derleth Fiction Prize and Alexander Chambers Essay Prize from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a selection by former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand for Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press, 2008).

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Seth has three in-progress novels that were started over a 30-year span: Smokin' Yella, a work of detective fiction; The Book of Pumpkins, an epic, Halloween-themed young-adult fantasy; and The Commonwealth, a gritty suburban drama about teenagers caught up in a network of Dungeons & Dragons-themed gangs in Massachusetts in the 1980s. The first chapter of the last of these won the aforementioned August Derleth Fiction Prize from University of Wisconsin at Madison. Seth’s first book, however, was Atlas 1999, a reference book written when he was 14 and intended to be the manual for a sprawling, counterintelligence-themed role-playing game set in the real world.

 

Seth submitted Atlas 1999 to the then-popular Steve Jackson Games in 1990—unbeknownst to him, in the midst of one of the most infamous counterintelligence-related scandals in U.S. history, which saw the U.S. Secret Service raiding Steve Jackson Games and wrongly confiscating some of its fictional work-product as supposed evidence of espionage. This bizarre episode would later be immortalized in a federal lawsuit, Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service (816 F. Supp. 432, W.D. Tex. 1993).

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Seth has published verse in hundreds of venues, including state reviews (e.g., Alaska Quarterly Review, California Quarterly, Colorado Review, Florida Review, Hawaii Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Texas Review, and Wisconsin Review); city reviews (e.g., Boston Review, Brooklyn Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, The Louisville Review, Madison Review, The Manhattan Review, New Orleans Review, Portland Review, and Seattle Review); reviews housed at universities (e.g., AGNI at Boston University, Bat City at University of Texas in Austin, Columbia Poetry Review at Columbia College Chicago, Conjunctions at Bard College, Gettysburg Review at Gettysburg College, Gulf Coast at University of Houston, LIT at The New School, Harvard Review at Harvard University, Meridian at University of Virginia, Jubilat at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Notre Dame Review at University of Notre Dame, The Southern Review at Louisiana State University, and Western Humanities Review at University of Utah); and major independent reviews (e.g., Poetry, Fence, Salmagundi, Verse, The Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, and Crazyhorse).

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From 2000 to 2002, Seth was on staff as a moderator at The Alsop Review’s Gazebo, one of the first creative writing workshops on the internet and the subject of a New Yorker investigation on how American poetry adjusted to the dawn of the digital age. At the time, the Gazebo (or “Gaz”, as its several hundred participants called it) was home to an astonishing array of up-and-coming creative writers on the cusp of their big break, including (but by no means limited to) children’s novelist Linda Sue Park, winner of the 2002 Newbery Medal; Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award-winning poet Paul Guest; Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize-winning novelist Patricia Lockwood; A.E. Stallings, a poet and translator who has been both a Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellow as well as a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (and who currently serves as Oxford University’s 47th Professor of Poetry, one of the most prestigious literary appointments in the English-speaking world); the poets laureate or Poets of the Year of several states, including New Hampshire (Patricia Fargnoli) and Alabama (Sue Scalf); and former, current and future college lecturers and professors such as Frances Leviston (University of Manchester), Don Taylor (Wichita State University), Claudia Grinnell (University of Louisiana at Monroe), Ciaran Berry (Trinity College), Terese Coe (New York Institute of Technology), Matthew Sperling (University College London), and others.

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Seth’s seminal essays on a burgeoning post-postmodern cultural philosophy, metamodernism—the subject of his Indiewire column, much of his writing at HuffPost, and several components of his academic research at University of New Hampshire—were credited by Sturgill Simpson as being an inspiration for his Grammy Award-nominated alt-country LP Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, an album ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the Top 50 albums of the 21st Century. These essays are now regularly cited in academic journals and treatises on metamodernism. Seth has been credited, with pseudonymous Scandinavian political philosopher, historian, and sociologist Hanzi Freinacht, with inspiring one of the five manifestos of The Solarpunk Movement founded by Australian philosopher Joe Lightfoot (see coverage at Y Combinator here, and Medium here).

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The critical theorist who coined the term and first developed the concept of metamodernism in 1975, University of Oregon and Syracuse University professor Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, has said of Seth that his “work on the poetics and the analytics of metamodernity is a very important conceptual contribution to contemporary theory.”

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Seth has guest-lectured on metamodernism and other topics (including experimental poetics, AI, higher education, the disciplinary history of English, criminal investigations, contemporary music, and contemporary U.S. politics) at many colleges and universities, including Harvard University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Iowa, University of Southern California, Bard College, New England College, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, University of Amsterdam, University of Maine at Farmington, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, The Pratt Institute, Illinois Wesleyan University, Manhattanville College, Drake University,

Southern California Institute of Architecture, Madison College (WI), St. Edward’s University (TX), and Southeastern Community College (IA).

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Pre-college, Seth was an award-winning Spanish student (with six years of study) and Hebrew tutor (with nine years of study). Post-college, he took his mandatory doctoral language exam in French. During his doctoral program he worked for years teaching English Composition to Chinese foreign nationals at one of the largest university writing centers in the United States. In the late 1990s, he became so obsessed with “Cool Cymru” that he tried to teach himself Welsh. At present he’s working through an intensive daily course to learn to read, write and speak Swedish.

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Long a lover of sports and music, Seth worked as an award-winning tennis instructor at the historic Cape Cod Sea Camps in Massachusetts; was a member of the Dartmouth Squash Club; and was, in his youth, an all-star soccer and baseball player who played on select, traveling, state tournament, and indoor teams in these sports across 30 seasons of participation. At Dartmouth he was an avid golfer; in high school he played in a B’nai B’rith International basketball league.

 

At other times he’s made extended—even years-long—attempts to become adept at certain less-common sports and activities, among them darts, croquet, shuffleboard, four-square, badminton, kickball, flag football, 20-a-side Boston-style “relieveo” (played across a whole zip code in rural Massachusetts), horseback riding (in which he took a college course), gymnastics (in which he took several years of lessons), ballroom dancing (more lessons), archery (more lessons), airgun riflery (more lessons), ice skating (more lessons), chess (another course), bowling, weightlifting, cycling, tetherball, cross-country skiing, and ping pong. He can’t throw a Frisbee—and can make no claim to having retained his former athleticism—but he remembers that time in his life fondly nonetheless.

 

Before leaving for college at age 17, Seth had formally studied piano, drums, the hammered dulcimer, and voice, immersing himself in musical experiences ranging from playing percussion in a Billy Joel cover band to singing in an a cappella group, from being the Vice President of his high school choir to giving piano recitals and singing in a group specializing in Renaissance madrigals.

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He has also dabbled in the recorder, the harmonica, the synthesizer, the bass drum—which he played more or less indifferently in an orchestra for a time—and the kazoo. While a student at Harvard Law School from 1998 to 2001, he was a regular at Twisted Village, the famous but now-shuttered psychedelia-focused Cambridge record shop owned by Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar (members of the band Magic Hour, with Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang of seminal neopsychedelic band Galaxie 500). Rogers and Biggar would later form the band Major Stars.

 

Seth is currently an EDM musician and indie-pop songwriter who has released 35 albums and three EPs under the pseudonym Hounds (in honor of his rescue hounds, Quinn and Scout). The first eleven of these LPs were instrumentals released for Retro subscribers, while all subsequent albums have been released on streaming platforms across the world. In Summer 2025, Hounds surpassed 25,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, ranking it in the Top 1% of musical artists on that platform. One of his songs, a political protest song titled “FAFO,” went viral around the time of the second Trump inauguration and can be found here. Hounds music ranges from Country to Folk, Psychedelic to Novelty, Electronic to Rock. Several albums comprise stylistic recreations (as opposed to homages) of music from the 1960s; though these albums feature original lyrics and instrumentation, they are intended to be indistinguishable sonically from the popular songs of the latter half of that decade. Hounds LPs in this mold include Carnaby, Golden Gate Park, and Open Fire (this last album as The Rangers). Seth writes some Hounds songs in languages besides English, for instance Swedish and Spanish. Hounds’ oeuvre also includes a Peter Pan rock opera.

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You can find Hounds—including much online-exclusive music—at houndsmusic.substack.com.

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You can listen to Hounds on Spotify here, YouTube Music here, or Apple Music (iTunes) here.

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Seth’s influences as a musician include the sixties psychedelia he used to specialize in as a radio DJ in the 1990s; TV, film, and especially video game scores; and trance, folk, and post-rock music.

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Among Seth's other areas of interest and expertise are 1980s-nostalgia touchstones like LEGO—he owns what is likely one of the larger collections of the plastic building bricks in New England—and Nintendo Entertainment System games, specifically “homebrew” (or “independent”) NES games developed this century. Retro includes the largest archive and ranking of such games in the world, featuring more than 1,000 NES titles developed after the lifespan of the system ended. His expertise in aftermarket 8-bit games is what led to him being selected to serve as the final judge in the aforementioned “Byte-Off” game-development competition. He also publishes a ranking at Retro of the best mobile games for Android, and has worked hard during the 2020s to expand his expertise in that area. Retro’s mobile-game rankings include hundreds and hundreds of top titles.

 

Seth collects sealed-and-graded vintage video games (besides NES games, games for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, SNES, PS2, and Sega Dreamcast); baseball caps; psychedelic-LP CD reissues from the 1980s and 1990s; Dungeons & Dragons reference books; LEGO-built G.I. Joe figures; and other equally esoteric items a nerd or dork who grew up in the mid-/late 80s would feel drawn to.

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Among the jobs Seth has held not mentioned above are chauffeur, ice cream shop server, copy editor, secretary, marketing department assistant, sandwich shop employee, assistant to a town planner, and paralegal.

 

Outside his 32 years of unbroken employment, Seth’s life has been just as frenetic. Shia LaBeouf told a Forbes reporter at SXSW that his art practice is significantly influenced by Seth’s essays on metamodernism; Seth once spoke to Captain America (Chris Evans), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and a main cast member from his favorite TV show (Community) on the same day. He’s at various times been a victim of Burglary, Assault (serving a subpoena in a junkyard in Vienna, Virginia), Identity Theft, Defamation, Criminal Threatening, Criminal Mischief, and Fraud. He nevertheless remains a staunch proponent of civil rights and civil liberties, and was proudly a member of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review during his law school years.

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Elon Musk has called Seth “an unreadable nonsense machine” and “retarded,” decrying his academic pedigree as “bullshit” in a public dialogue with venture capitalist Marc Andresseen, who for his part called Seth “a pretty interesting cat.” Actor and comedian Russell Brand has said of Seth, “It’s ridiculous how many things Seth Abramson has achieved mastery of....[he’s] charming, informative, brilliant, and bright.” Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, has called Seth “a huge social media star,” while Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has called his work “amazing.” Former Trump White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has said of the Proof Trilogy, “If all Americans read Seth Abramson’s work, Trump will lose [the 2024 U.S. presidential election] in a landslide.” Lincoln Project co-founder and GOP strategist Steve Schmidt has urged his audience to “Please follow and read everything Seth Abramson writes.” Former primetime CNN anchor Chris Cuomo called Seth a “fire-breather” whose “passion” America “needs,” while New York Magazine deems him a “cult-favorite author.”

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For many more such comments about Seth, including praise for his work from Vanity Fair, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Salon, Politico, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and others, see this page.

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Seth is near-sighted, flat-footed, slope-shouldered, cowlicked, stye-prone, acrochordon-prone, cup-earred, hirsute, herniated, graying, balding, ashy, hyperhidrosic, GERD-beset, vertiginous, long-lashed, diabetic, crooked-nosed, insomniacal, occasionally gouty, subclinically agoraphobic, epistolophobic, clinically anxious (though in full remission), and spectrumy.

 

Seth has been known by many different names at various points, including Pablo (his Spanish name), Chaim (his Hebrew name), Stuey (his high school nickname), Daniel Isaac (a briefly used nom de plume from the 1990s), Buster (a family nickname), “The Seth” (an art school nickname), Abe (an elementary school nickname), Jules Bronco (a choir nickname), Mr. Freeze (a name given to him the local police department when he was practicing law as a public defender), Rankings Guy (a derogatory moniker used by certain members of the American poetry community), Mega Man (a derogatory moniker used by certain people on social media), and The Nashua Advocate (a blogging pseudonym during the 2000s).

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Seth has experienced a lifetime of bizarre injuries. A bee once flew right into his eyeball and died, scratching his cornea. A chicken quill inexplicably still attached to a chicken wing punctured his uvula and, when the local fire department couldn’t remove it, it was removed instead in the ER of a Cape Cod (MA) hospital. He once walked to an emergency room in Wisconsin because he was high and felt like his penis was no longer attached to his body. A prank gone wrong in a local synagogue fractured two of his fingers. He threw out his back in a convenience store, causing him to drop and shatter a glass jar of tomato sauce he was holding. He’s had too many skin tags removed to count; an endoscopy revealed he even has skin tags along his esophageal tract. He had neuropathy in one shoulder for fifteen years, the cause of which not even specialists could diagnose. In low light he goes blind in one eye. When very stressed, he becomes unable to walk due to a sharp pain extending the entire length of his leg. He’s been diagnosed with a sliding hiatal hernia. He once nearly fainted in a hospital waiting room from a paralytic ileus. Playing third base in Little League, he took a line drive to the face and was taken to the hospital. While a Senior Minor center fielder, he tore his groin on a successful stolen base attempt and thereafter developed Steve Blass Disease. His baldness pattern was deemed so unusual by a journalist for the Chronicle of Higher Education that he asked to take a photo of it. He once bled profusely from his belly button for no obvious reason, releasing so much blood in the process that his wife said it looked like he’d been shot. He broke a tooth in half in a childhood biking accident; one of his front teeth is fake. A doctor in Iowa diagnosed him with a herniated disc, but said it wasn’t worth figuring out which disc it was via imaging, so he still doesn’t know. An x-ray technician once told him he had the largest hip bone she had ever seen in a male. He once lost thirty pounds in third days by eating the same three meals every day. He had to have a root canal after a drunk dentist damaged one of the nerves in his mouth. Due to chronic post-nasal drip, he’s had a tickle in his throat for twenty years; it makes him cough almost imperceptibly once or twice a minute when he’s not speaking. As a teenager he suffered from such debilitating constipation it nearly caused him to faint on a regular basis, and had a damnable cowlick that no hair product or haircut could fix. He was also prone to get sties on his eyelids. According to his optometrist, he has a foreign object in one of his eyes that will cause him to go blind in that eye if it moves; she’s told him it’s unlikely to do so, however. He effortlessly raised a sweat in the Arctic Circle. He once suffered from INMI for three weeks, recovering only after listen to Beach House’s “Space Song” on repeat for hours. He once “greened out”—the worst experience of his life, as it was one that caused him to continuously experience the feeling (not the reality) of imminent death for three hours. During the experience he was taken to the local ER, where, only semi-conscious, he vomited on several doctors and nurses and was eventually diagnosed with having ingested a dangerous synthetic THC originating from Colorado. When he was in his twenties he was so severely mauled by a dog that he had to have emergency facial reconstructive surgery in the middle of the night, an event that caused what was once a face roughly symmetrical in its dimensions to develop a noticeable droop on one side.

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Incredibly, despite all the foregoing, Seth is also married—and to the smartest, wisest, and most accomplished woman he’s ever met.

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Prior to getting married, Seth was involved in a number of long-term relationships: with a rugby player, a wedding-dress model, a YA-lit author, a doctor, a yoga instructor, a union organizer, and an award-winning British poet. The oddest place he ever had sex was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the second-strangest was a subway station on Boston's Red Line; and the third-strangest was long-term eighteen-wheeler parking at a rest area on I-95. He also once had phone sex with a Halliburton spokeswoman. He lost his virginity as a teenager—and did so before he’d ever kissed anyone.

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The Abramson Family has lived longer in the Massachusetts zip code it resides in than anyone ever has. The condo block he grew up on in that zip code was so rife with talent that his childhood friends included both Daniel Newbower, a New York City comedian who has worked with WKUK (The Whitest Kids U'Know) and Dan Zoen, an Alaskan folk-pop singer whose records include Bird Point and Silt. Other luminaries included Michael Ames, who as a U.S. Marine in World War II fought in the famed Battle of Okinawa against the Imperial Japanese Army; Dr. Ronald Newbower, a Harvard Medical School and MIT faculty member who both helped administrate the world-renowned Mass General Hospital and invented physiologic instrumentation now used to save countless lives worldwide; and Jeffrey Coleron, a professional voice actor and pianist who has played everywhere from Disney World to Universal Studios, from concerts sponsored by Bill Gates’ Microsoft to events funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.