While an undergraduate, Mnookin lived in Adams House, “back when Adams was Adams, as we like to say,” he jokes. “I think my sophomore year there was when they finally closed the pool after one too many naked orgies.” Although he enjoyed his time at Adams prior to house randomization, he says that Quincy House was “shockingly diverse” in comparison to his undergraduate experience, what he sees as a positive change.
“When I was in Adams House it was a bunch of white humanities concentrators who did a lot of drugs and a lot of them were gay,” he says. “When I was in Quincy House I thought ‘this is much better.’ One of the good things about college is you meet a lot of people who aren’t like yourself, and I didn’t meet a lot of people who weren’t like myself.”
While an undergraduate, Mnookin was a history of science concentrator and a writer for Fifteen Minutes. Prior to working at the weekly magazine, he comped the the The Crimson’s news section, though after writing a story that made fun of a theft of cereal at Harvard Business School, he was told he was not cut out for the work. “I think I lasted about two days,” he jokes, “I was some punk-ass freshman coming in, and at the time I had dreadlocks and five earrings and blue toenails, and I was probably—not probably—a little bit full of myself.”
Mnookin became more interested in journalism after he wrote a feature on a Greatful Dead concert as a sophomore. “That was the first time I realized I could use newspapers for fun and profit and use it to get into concerts and to interview these people that I was totally obsessed with,” he says. “Over the next couple of years I just did more and more of that.”
After college, Mnookin began freelancing on his own, and went on to write full-time for Newsweek, as well as for The New Yorker, Slate, the New York Observer and other publications. His major autobiographical piece published in Salon, entitled “Harvard and Heroin,” detailed his drug experiences throughout his life, including his heroin addiction during his postgraduate years while living in New York and Boston. After a number of hospitalizations, including an incident in which a doctor said he’d “never seen anyone come in here in this condition and live,” Mnookin underwent treatment at a live-in rehabilitation clinic in Florida, and has been clean ever since.
Mnookin recounts in Hard News his casual acquaintance with Jayson Blair prior to the news of Blair’s downfall at the Times became public, the result of their mutual struggle with addiction. “I had heard that he was struggling to stay sober, and I was sympathetic; I had stopped using drugs and alcohol six years before, when I was in my mid-twenties,” he recounts in the book.
Mnookin understands the difficulties of entering the journalism world after Harvard, noting “it’s really competitive.” Nonetheless, he stressed the importance of broadening one’s hopes and working at a smaller publication rather than toiling away obscurely at a major one.
“I always tell people to go someplace smaller,” he says, “I’d rather write stories that I feel like are going to challenge me to be proud of a less glamorous place.” Even though it’s tough to break in, he adds, “you’ll be surprised at the amount of doors Harvard will open.”
—Staff writer Joe DiMento can be reached at dimento@fas.harvard.edu.