Press Mentions

APRIL 14, 2008—THE NEW YORK TIMES

Here’s a story (With Mentors at Their Sides, Girls in Need Write Their Stories and Find New Lives) in The New York Times about an interesting organization called Girls Write Now that links up women writers and teenage girls. I worked for a year with an amazing girl named Pin Chang who had just arrived in New York from China a couple of years earlier.

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NOVEMBER 29, 2007 — GAWKER

A rite of passage: my marriage mocked on Gawker!

Deborah Kolben and Gal Beckerman are Getting Married!

Former Village Voice managing editor Deborah Kolben and Columbia Journalism Review’s Gal Beckerman are getting hitched! “A sunset walk on a beach in Mexico, a couple of beers, a sobbing Debbie,” is how Beckerman described his proposal. Gag. “I never thought of myself as that girl,” Kolben said, “But the second I had a ring on my finger, it was ‘Take a picture! Take a picture!’” Heh. What has Kolben been up to since being axed by the Voice in September, after six months on the job? Well, a piece she wrote for the New York Times last weekend on a Flatbush Dunkin’ Donuts run by a Jewish woman and a Muslim man ran under the headline “Worshipping Different Gods (But United On The Pork Issue.)” We love it when the Times makes awkward and erroneous jokes about religion! A correction was swiftly issued: “A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God—not different ones.” [Photo by David Reeves.]

FEBRUARY 26, 2007—THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

Voice Hires New Managing Editor; More Sun Poaching!

The Village Voice has just named Deborah Kolben, formerly the city editor of the New York Sun, as the paper’s managing editor.Since David Blum, ex-Sun television critic, took over as the Voice‘s editor-in-chief, there have been several defections from the conservative daily to the lefty weekly. Ms. Kolben now joins Sun alumni Nathan Lee (film critic) and Maggie Shnayerson (PR Director) over at Cooper Square.

AUGUST 2006 — “Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader”

An essay I wrote about the self-described first-ever Jewish, Playboy Playmate is included in an anthology about sexuality.

“This anthology of 62 readings from contemporary scholarly literature, trade books, popular media, as well as contributed articles, examines the many ways in which human sexuality is a socially constructed and regulated behavior, and how it is studied by social scientists.”