The Dinner Conversation That Changed My Life

I wanted to share some thoughts and reflections on a person I only met once over dinner but who genuinely changed my life.

Tim Mohr passed away on March 31 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 55.

I found out at a truck stop off I-40 near Lake Havasu, Arizona. I opened Facebook and saw that Anita Thompson, Hunter S. Thompson’s widow, had tagged me in her remembrance of Tim, complete with photos from his visits to Owl Farm in Woody Creek with his family. The sadness hit instantly, right as I was deciding what snacks to buy for the drive to Flagstaff.

I did a quick Google News search and saw remembrances in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Publisher’s Weekly, and his publisher Europa Editions, for whom he brilliantly translated seven German-language novels by Alina Bronsky into English.

Tim wasn’t a household name—but goddamn, he mattered to those of us lucky enough to enter his orbit, even briefly. Every now and then, I’ll meet someone who worked at Playboy, and Tim was always the first person I’d ask if they knew—or had worked with.

I met him only once at a dinner in New York City with Anita, yet his words and kindness changed my life.

He helped me find my voice at a stage in my life when I didn't have a clue what I was doing. He nudged me toward a life in digital meaning and publishing and shaped how I thought about music, culture, and writing. He showed me that thinking deeply and writing boldly were just as important in the digital era as they’d been in the halcyon print media days, even during that odd, uncertain stretch of blogs and banner ads in the pre-Obama late 2000s.

He had a brilliant mind (he went to Yale), was deeply thoughtful, and exceptionally kind. He edited Hunter S. Thompson’s final major Playboy interview, Postcards from the Proud Highway, coaxing Hunter into profound reflections on freedom, violence, and bold living. Editors don’t get enough respect for shaping ideas into something that flows. In that piece, Tim captured Hunter’s voice with clarity and care. It took quite a bit of work. For example: IE:

“Freedom is a challenge. You decide who you are by what you do. It’s like a question, like a fork in the road. An ongoing question you have to keep answering correctly.”

And:

“In the end, it’s not so much how to succeed in life as it is how to survive the life you have chosen.”

In 2009, when I was working alongside Anita Thompson on the book Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, a collection of Hunter’s interviews, Tim was incredibly generous and patient in guiding me through the intricate licensing processes of Playboy and various other media outlets. You can’t just put someone else’s work in a book, after all. And he understood the purpose of the project was to preserve Hunter’s wisdom that he captured so elegantly for future generations to enjoy.

Tim collaborated with Guns N' Roses’ Duff McKagan on his first memoir, transformed Paul Stanley’s complicated life into a gripping narrative, and translated countless essential German novels with precision and care.

His own book, Burning Down the Haus, vividly chronicled the East German punks whose courage helped dismantle the Stasi dictatorship just before the Berlin Wall fell. Tim knew that world firsthand, having lived in Berlin as a club DJ before moving to New York for a career in publishing. He was exactly the type of literary figure who inspired you to become smarter, sharper, and more fearless.

But for me, Tim truly shone brightest in a November 2007 Playboy article simply titled "Clueless." Here’s a link to it that I dug up with my Wayback Machine superpowers, having long been wiped from Playboy.com.

It was his sharp, hilarious takedown of David Brooks’ stuffy hand-wringing in The New York Times about modern music culture, in an op-ed called “The Segmented Society.” kicked a sleeping dog within indie Brooklyn music blogsophere. Brooks, famous for his pretentious "thoughtfluencer" takes, always irked me, especially after his visit to my Central Pennsylvania hometown post-9/11, which became the basis for his overly simplistic "two Americas" Atlantic piece called "One Nation, Slightly Divisible."

Using his space in the Grey Lady, Brooks had written a column bemoaning how fragmented the culture had become. How nobody listened to the same music anymore, how the monoculture was dead, and how that supposedly spelled doom for our collective identity. To him, the death of radio dominance and the rise of subgenres spelled the end of unity. Brooks must have listened to an LCD Soundsystem song and had the same reaction as a revivalist preacher hearing Elvis in the late 1950s.

Tim didn't have it. He saw through Brooks’ hand-wringing as nostalgia-drenched elitism and classic Boomer generation gatekeeping. Media was changing, as it always does downstream of technological progress, and tastes were evolving, too. A guy mourning the loss of a top-down culture where gatekeepers like him got to decide what mattered. Bluntly, Brooks sounded like a whiny old man.

“David Brooks, you, sir, are a jackass," he wrote in his rebuttal.

With those words published on Playboy.com, Tim became a legend in my eyes. In the rest of the essay, Tim tore Brooks to shreds, going to bat for a new generation’s art.

He then articulated cultural stagnation in a way that stuck with me for years:

“People without a clue about music console themselves with the false notion that people who do are just willfully obscurist. In reality, it’s just a question of whether you are open to new music or not. If your tastes ossified when you exited the frat house basement upon graduation, you will be damned to write pieces about thirty and forty-year-old bands and how great everything was in the old days because for you, everything going forward is obscure, and becomes more so each year removed from the last time you actively listened to new music. Naturally, if you continue to listen to new music, you—duh—listen to new music. The music isn’t obscure; it’s obscure to David Brooks and others of his ilk for whom music is set in aspic.”

That passage became a lens I still use: open vs. closed, curious vs. comfortable, alive vs. preserved. Sometimes, I still find myself whispering that line about "tastes ossified in the frat house basement" as a reminder that culture is fluid, not a statue. Tim nailed it.

Tim then perfectly dismantled Brooks' "get off my lawn" mentality:

"One of the greatest things about pop music is the way it changes. And its transience is something to be celebrated, not decried... God forbid we get stuck listening to the Eagles, Pink Floyd, and Boston (to name a few artists with the diamond-certified albums Brooks seems to cherish). Man, I lived through classic rock radio as boomers like Brooks spent the 1980s remembering their glory days. If they’re the ones defining it, I say screw 'this thing called rock,' as Brooks describes it, and fuck their need for self-affirmation through mass shared experiences like a Bruce Springsteen arena show."

Back in 2007, I was a wide-eyed college kid from rural Pennsylvania, nervously emailing Tim after that unforgettable dinner in New York — the one with calamari, Heineken, and a conversation that cracked something open in me. I was 21, barely confident enough to hit send, and had no idea if he’d even respond. But he did. Warmly. Thoughtfully. Generously.

I asked if Playboy offered summer internships. I told him I was thinking about digital media, still unsure if publishing was a real career path or just a phase. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t ghost. He wrote back the next morning from his Playboy.com email, offering to send me materials from his Hunter S. Thompson interviews and explaining the realities of editorial budgets. And then he slipped in a line that hit harder than any advice I got in a classroom:

“My parents and all of their friends are teachers as well, and they said it’s just not the same as when they had the chance to break into the biz…”

He said it so elegantly. Not bitter, just honest. He talked about the rise of contract work over tenure in academia and how the dream of a stable academic life was vanishing for anyone without a trust fund. "The prospects for tenure track jobs, ie jobs that could facilitate a decent life for someone like me, were grim." So he ended up in publishing and eventually at Playboy, where he could get paid to explore his intellectual interests, “albeit in a roundabout way."

That stuck with me. It still does. It was the first time someone in the game admitted that chasing what you love might not be easy, but it’s still worth chasing.

He told me the truth. And in doing so, gave me permission to keep going.

Without that conversation—and his follow-up email—I’m not sure I ever would’ve seriously considered writing for a living. I wouldn’t have joined up BroBible in late 2009, which became a Playboy-challenger voice for a new generation of millennials and, at least for me, a damn good career (I think?). Tim’s encouragement inspired me to pursue a path that allowed me to explore ALL my interests and get paid for it, rather than pigeonholing myself into just sports or just music or just movies, or just grabbag Internet nonsense.

Tim championed ideas—the weird, the rebellious, and the thoughtful. When I visited Anita at Owl Farm a few years ago for the first time in well over a decade and learned about Tim's book Burning Down The Haus, I ordered and devoured it immediately, reaching out to tell him how much it resonated. I told him I hadn’t been able to shake this one line he echos from those badass East German punks throughout his text:

DON’T DIE IN THE WAITING ROOM OF THE FUTURE.

That’s a hell of a mantra. Tim reminded us all to stay curious and open, to prevent our minds and tastes from ossifying. And he did it with humor, brilliance, and authentic kindness.

I’m deeply sorry for Tim’s wife, kids, and family. Although I barely knew him, my admiration for Tim was immense—almost mythic, because of that dinner and the path it inspired. In meeting him, I saw someone I could aspire to be—rabidly passionate about writing and media during a time of profound change.

And if I ever end up helping someone the way Tim helped me, over dinner, over email, with a single conversation that changes everything, I’ll consider that a pretty good legacy, too.

Rest easy, Tim.

And thank you.