Bill Wasik

Bill Wasik is a deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, and self-proclaimed originator of the flash mob.

Biography

Wasik graduated from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1996.[1] He served as Editor of The Weekly Week, and contributed to McSweeney's. He was a senior editor both at Harper's Magazine and Wired Magazine before becoming deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine.

Flash mob inventor

"For years he was 'Bill'—no last name—who cryptically told reporters he worked 'in the culture industry,'” wrote Emily Boutilier in the Winter 2015 edition of the Amherst alumni magazine.[1] Yet in 2003, he claims, he was the originator of the first flash mob. Three years later he "revealed himself as the inventor" in an eleven-part series in Harper's,[1] having anonymously organized the first recognized examples in New York City during the summer of 2003. [2][3]

Wasik said in 2010 that he was surprised by the violence of some of the gatherings. He said the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could.

“It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.[4]

Works

Wasik is the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture (Viking, 2009) and, with Monica Murphy, Rabid (Viking), which was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He is also the editor, with Roger D. Hodge, of Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine (New Press, 2008)

References
  1. Mob Mentality, Emily Boutilier, Amherst Magazine, Winter 2015
  2. Wasik, Bill (March 2006). "My Crowd, or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob" (Subscription). Harper's Magazine. pp. 56–66. ISSN 0017-789X. OCLC 4532730. Retrieved 2007-02-02.
  3. Goldstein, Lauren (2003-08-10). "The Mob Rules". Time Europe (18 April 2003 issue). Vol. 162 no. 7. ISSN 0040-781X. OCLC 1767509. Archived from the original on 13 July 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-14.
  4. "Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message", New York Times


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