Matthew John Labash (born 1970 or 1971) is an American author and journalist who writes the Slack Tide newsletter. He was a senior writer, and later a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard, where his articles frequently appeared. Labash has contributed to Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Salon, Slate, Washingtonian, The New Republic, The Drake (a fly fishing magazine), and Nerve Magazine.
Labash specializes in long-form, humorous reportage. Many of his pieces are profiles, often of crooked and disgraced politicians; others are accounts of offbeat conferences or portraits of cities on the skids, such as Detroit and New Orleans. In 2010, Simon & Schuster published a collection of his pieces entitled Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: and Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.
Early life and education His father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and Labash lived some of his childhood years in Germany. He has described himself as a "military brat."
He attended Mount Olive Lutheran School in San Antonio from 1974 to 1979; Hahn Elementary School on Hahn Air Force Base from 1979 to 1980; and Gateway Christian High School in San Antonio from 1982 to 1986. He studied journalism at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, graduating in 1993.
Career
Slack Tide In October, 2021, Labash launched a newsletter called Slack Tide. The newsletter, which comes out once to twice a week, requires a subscription, though some posts are free to the public. Labash describes the newsletter as being "about life and politics and culture and fly fishing and God and whatever else comes, not necessarily in that order."
Early career He has said that his first job was at "a pool snack bar at the Andrews AFB Officer's Club." Before joining The Weekly Standard in 1995, Labash worked for the Albuquerque Monthly, Washingtonian magazine, and The American Spectator.
Weekly Standard Labash wrote for the Weekly Standard since its founding in 1995. His first article for the magazine appeared in its issue of September 18, 1995.
He wrote two general types of pieces for the Weekly Standard – pieces for the magazine's website that "are a lot riff-ier, and pop-culture-y and you can polish it off in a day or two," and pieces for the print magazine that require him to "go see the world and find an interesting nook and cranny... I like to find little undiscovered pockets or subjects or interesting people and just ride them into the ground. Things I know other people aren't going to get at." He has said that he profiles men "who are not quite in control of their own appetites, who live a little bit larger, so we don't have to."
Labash has profiled scores of people for the Standard, including his friend and colleague Christopher Hitchens,"A Hitchless World", 16 December 2011 politician James Traficant (whom he called "the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress"), CNN reporter Anderson Cooper (of whom he has stated "now all journalistic history is divided into two periods: BAC and AAC. Before Anderson Cooper and After"), filmmaker Michael Moore ("a Ritz-Carlton revolutionary...the entertainment world's Jesse Jackson, a migratory Mau-Mauist showing up at corporations to demand concessions that will ultimately benefit him, leaving companies a choice between throwing him a bone and risking public humiliation"), and celebrity lawyer William Kunstler ("Defender of Stalinists, all-around press hound, and guest star on TV's Law and Order").
He reported that the 1995 National Conference on Political Assassinations was attended by "fine, friendly folk...from lonely burgs in the Rust and Cheese Belts" who "left behind practices and jobs and bughouses and militia recruiting offices to spend a long weekend in a whirlpool of scholarship, muckraking, and paranoia with the ambience of a 30-year chess club reunion gone deeply, seriously awry." He recounted his "bourbon tour of Kentucky" and reported on the Whiteness Project, "an 'interactive documentary short' brought to us by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow,"
He also reported from Kuwait during the Iraq War. "I was embedded at the resort Hilton in Kuwait," he wrote. "I donned a chemical suit about nine or ten times a day. The alarm kept going off in our hotel. This was back when we thought Saddam had chemical weapons and was willing to use them." Also, he wrote about the death of his friend and colleague Andrew Breitbart, whom he memorialized as "a partisan warrior and a guerrilla theater aficionado – half right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman.... Breitbart had the brains, the talent, and the animal charisma to get people to set cars on fire for him, or to run off with him to the desert where he might start his own anti-Obama doomsday cult. But while he believed in what he espoused, perhaps a little too much, he was also in it for other reasons – for action, and for amusement. He didn't just hit scandal head-on. He enjoyed coming at it slyly. He gloried in the art of presentation."
Labash deliberately does not use Facebook or Twitter, and has written lengthy essays attacking both of these popular social media sites. In his May 2013 article about Twitter, he stated, "I outright despise the inescapable microblogging service, which nudges its users to leave no thought unexpressed, except for the fully formed ones....I hate the way Twitter transforms the written word into abbreviations and hieroglyphics, the staccato bursts of emptiness that occur when Twidiots who have no business writing for public consumption squeeze themselves into 140-character cement shoes. People used to write more intelligently than they speak. Now, a scary majority tend to speak more intelligently than they tweet.....I hate that formerly respectable adults now think it's okay to go at each other like spray-tanned girls on Jersey Shore, who start windmill-slapping each other after they've each had double-digit cherry vodkas and one calls the other "fat."
Labash has occasionally departed from the Weekly Standard'''s perceived political positions. He once stated, "I was sour on the war (in Iraq) when many, many of our neoliberal friends were still something close to cheerleaders....I just never understood what was in it for America to get bogged down there for the better part of a decade. Still don't. I thought it was a bad play." Bush, he said in 2004, "has spent the better part of a year and a half painting smiley faces on Iraq, when it is still a festering sore, to put it charitably."
Labash mocked Sarah Palin in a 2010 piece about her reality TV show, noting that despite her assertion that she loves Alaska "like I love my family," except that Palin "didn't give her family up after governing it for two-and-a-half years, so that she could get a Fox News contract, and make 100 grand per speech, and write two books in a year, and drag her entire family onto a tacky reality show." He added: "one could see how Karl Rove... has a point when suggesting that the American people might expect 'a certain level of gravitas' in someone who's considering running for president, and that starring in your own reality show might not be the ticket."
By way of explaining the Standard's tolerance for his ideological deviation, he said in an interview with Esquire: "it's called diversity of opinion. There is such a thing at the same magazine, believe it or not." Apropos of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Labash added: "My opinions often aren't his, and his often aren't mine. That's why my byline runs over my work, and his byline runs over his." He expanded on these observations in another interview: "I work in the right-wing world, but we have a good understanding at the magazine that everyone gets to follow their interests and eccentricities. Our editors... give us a lot of writerly freedom. I'm less interested in scoring ideological points than in finding good stories. Good stories shouldn't have to conform to some predetermined formula."
Other journalism Labash has written for the Wall Street Journal, Salon, and Slate.
He contributed to the 2014 anthology The Seven Deadly Virtues: 18 Conservative Writers on Why the Virtuous Life is Funny as Hell, edited by Jonathan V. Last, which was described by the publisher as "a hilarious, insightful, sanctimony-free remix of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues—without parental controls." Other contributors include Christopher Buckley, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Rob Long, P. J. O'Rourke, and Joe Queenan.
Labash writes occasionally for Nerve.com and Nerve magazine, which, he said, "prides itself as a literary smut magazine. They're good people. I like them and they like me and we both like sex. I'm sort of the house prude and the pet reactionary. It strikes me when I'm doing it. They actually hire a guy like me to react against sex because it's impossible to shock people with sex these days."
Fly Fishing with Darth Vader In 2010, a collection of Labash essays from the Standard, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: and Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys, was published by Simon & Schuster. The articles ranged from profiles of politicians, ranging from then-Vice Pres. Richard B. Cheney to former Ohio Rep. James Traficant, and American cities such as Detroit, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana, to personal opinion-related pieces on such issues as US-Canada relations, physical education, and Facebook.
The book received wide acclaim. "Labash takes readers to the fringes in his portraits of people and places outside the mainstream and, very often, beyond our ken," wrote Publishers Weekly. "His subjects are outlandish and unforgettable....His profiles of disgraced former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, corrupt former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Vice President Dick Cheney stand out for their affecting portrayals of the humanity behind the larger-than-life personas." The review in Booklist stated: "Whatever their politics, readers will appreciate Labash's energetic style and biting insights."
Describing Labash as "one of the most consistently entertaining magazine writers today," Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic praised his "innate sympathy for scoundrels," saying that "he brings them to life like no other journalist today." Goldberg called Fly Fishing with Darth Vader "the funniest book of the year." David Carr of the New York Times called Labash "the king of hang time, insinuating himself into a subject's world — remember immersion journalism? — and then writing those encounters up in all their rococo glory." Describing Labash as "one of the absolute greatest magazine writers in America" and calling Fly Fishing with Darth Vader "exceptionally good," The reviewer for Esquire wrote that "Every now and then, a collection of remarkable stories from a magazine writer has the effect of unleashing a significant new voice on an unsuspecting public. Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby comes to mind. And so it is with Matt Labash's wonderful Fly Fishing with Darth Vader."
Emily Bazelon of Slate described the book as "a collection of inflated egos, delicately punctured. You can hear the hiss as the air goes out of Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, and Roger Stone. At the same time, you'll also come away with some sympathy for these men, or at least their foibles."