Matthew John "Matt" 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 Substack 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, 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,"