Rough Sketch is a newsletter by Washington, D.C. journalist Menachem Wecker on culture, religion, arts, politics, and everything in between. It’s a sketchbook running parallel to published reporting and art criticism, which has appeared in Washington Post Magazine, Wall St. Journal, Houston Chronicle, Atlantic, Playboy, and elsewhere. Among this newsletter’s subscribers are current and former newspaper and magazine editors and reporters, clergy, and museum directors and curators.
Prior posts appear here. Rough Sketch costs $10 monthly ($100 annually). The premium version includes original essays, while the more-limited free one tends to center on published writings.
A former U.S. News & World Report education reporter, Wecker has interviewed Mel Brooks about herring and has covered everything from museum taxidermy origins to Zoroastrian dating. His 2017 Playboy feature told of “Infiltrating the CIA’s Secret Art Collection,” and 2019 Washington Post Magazine feature investigated “fake news” objects at the nation’s preeminent museums. Here’s his website.
