Career
After graduating from Northwestern University's Medill School Of Journalism, Pollack worked as a staff reporter for the Chicago Reader from 1993 to 2000, covering Chicago city politics and writing profiles of urban eccentrics. Meanwhile, he performed with various improv comedy troupes around Chicago, including ImprovOlympic (where he studied with Del Close) and the Free Associates. After Dave Eggers's magazine McSweeney's began publishing his work, Pollack began appearing in shows with Eggers, John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Zadie Smith, David Byrne, Arthur Bradford, They Might Be Giants, M. Doughty, and many others before parting ways with McSweeney's in 2003.
Pollack wrote a political satire column for Vanity Fair, and the "Bad Sex With Neal Pollack" column for Nerve.com. His freelance journalism appears in Wired, Slate.com, Salon.com, Men's Journal, GQ, and many other publications. One of his Slate.com articles was featured in the Best American Sportswriting collection of 2006. His satirical online take down of James Frey was named one of the "Top 26 Cultural Moments Of The Decade" by Slate cultural critic Troy Patterson.
In 2007, along with Ben Brown and Matthew Tobey, Pollack started Offsprung.com, a humor magazine and web community for parents, where Pollack contributes an advice column. The blog on his website, Alternadad, records Pollack's continuing adventures with his son Elijah; his wife, painter Regina Allen; and his Boston terrier Hercules. He also writes features about technology for the American and British editions of Wired and writes "The Y Factor," a column about yoga from the male perspective, for Yoga Journal. In June 2010, Pollack completed a 200-hour yoga teacher's certification course at Richard Freeman's Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and he teaches yoga at conferences and studios around the country.
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