So who is this Richard Rubin, anyway?
Funny you should ask.
There are a lot of people named Richard Rubin floating around out there. According to a website that claims to know these things, there are exactly 264 Richard Rubins in the United States of America today. 263 of them are not this one.
This one is not:
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The Isotoner Glove expert for the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
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A runner-up on the first season of “Beauty and the Geek.”
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The author of Foundations of Library and Information Science.
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The author of Press, Party, and Presidency.
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The author of a biweekly political newspaper column in California.
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A tax attorney in Georgia.
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A criminal defense attorney in Vermont.
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A rheumatologist in Texas.
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A professor of Dentistry in Pennsylvania.
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The Medical Director of a private school in Connecticut.
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The President of a company that manufactures industrial containers in Michigan.
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The reporter who covers U.S. tax policy for The Wall Street Journal.
(Although he and our Richard Rubin occasionally receive emails and DMs intended for each other.) -
The former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration.
(Actually, that would be Robert Rubin; you’d be surprised how many people can’t seem to tell the difference between “Robert” and “Richard.”) -
The author of Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool.
(That’s Richard Russo.)
No. This one is:
A writer, teacher, orator (well, he gives talks and presentations, not speeches, but he likes the sound of “orator” better than “speaker”), documentary talking head, and bon vivant. ◈ The author of some twenty pieces, and counting, for The New York Times Travel section. ◈ The author of more than a dozen essays and articles for The Atlantic. ◈ The author of several acclaimed pieces for The New York Times Magazine, including “The Ghosts of Emmett Till” (anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing 2006) and “Not Far From Forsaken.” ◈ The author of a series of essays, on everything from genealogy to collecting, for AARP the Magazine. ◈ The author of pieces for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, New York Magazine, Parade, Slate and The Daily Beast. ◈ The 2008-2010 Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. ◈ The winner of the Associated Press of Mississippi and Louisiana Managing Editors’ Award for Best Daily Newspaper Sports Feature, 1989 (under 9,000 circulation category). ◈ The host of “Late Night Jazz with Rich Rubin” (don’t call him “Rich”) on WUAL-FM in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1989-1990, a show which reputedly had more than a dozen listeners, depending on the night. ◈ The author of “Over There – And Gone Forever,” a Veterans Day essay named one of the New York Times’ notable Op-Ed pieces of 2007. ◈ The author of Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (Atria, 2002). ◈ The author of The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). ◈ The author of Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). ◈ The author, indeed, of his own destiny.
Is this Richard Rubin the best one?
Certainly, he’s too modest to say. But it is a free country; you decide for yourself.