Senior lecturer in Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities and writes for The Atlantic.
Scrivener revolutionized my writing life and I’d be a mess without it. Boom, Bust, Exodus is a collection of interwoven storylines from multiple settings in two countries that I collected in over a decade of sociological field research. It was a huge project, and it blew up Word early. When I found Scrivener, I suddenly had a tool that not only helped me to create, but also to play with structure, to add important annotations and crazy ideas to try out, and, crucially, to organize interview transcriptions, timelines, journal and newspaper articles, and government reports—and to have all of it right there, at the ready. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool organizer, and Scrivener helped me tame this beast of a project. I now also use it for structuring presentations, radio interviews, op-eds, and short articles, including this testimonial! It is simple, intuitive, and powerful, and it made my book better than it would have been without it. It’s just so good, and ridiculous value to boot.