About
I’m a journalist. I have a degree in psychology from Yale and I’m a Senior Editor at Psychology Today. I live in Brooklyn. I’m Canadian. In my spare time, I run an ultimate frisbee league in Brooklyn and compete in an oral storytelling series called The Moth.
Journalism
For as long as I’ve been writing, people have been hating it. Even in college, I already had critics: Rumpus, Yale’s tabloid, once did a take-down of me, writing, “And then there are obnoxious present tense pieces by Jay Dixit, who learned pretension in The New Journal’s master class.”
When I moved to New York in 2000, I started writing for Rolling Stone, a dream come true—except that I was already ten years older than that kid from Almost Famous. My first piece, an article about the sexual culture at Wellesley College, would no doubt have died a quiet death had not a stroke of luck nudged me out of oblivion. After the article came out, the president of Wellesley issued a press release calling my article “irresponsible,” “sensationalist,” “distorted,” “appalling,” “prurient,” “salacious,” “ludicrous,” “stereotypic,” “deplorable,” “immature,” and “offensive”—and those were just the adjectives. I was only too happy to go on Fox TV and explain that I had all my quotes on tape. Meanwhile, my article was covered in the Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Yahoo News. Did I mention I got hate mail?
I started writing front-page stories for the New York Times City Section, interviewing Jerry Seinfeld and George Carlin for a piece about the comedy club in Brooklyn where they’d gotten their start and declaring that the comedy circuit in New York was basically a form of group therapy. For a while didn’t manage to get anyone to notice me enough to complain. I even got some thank you letters for a Salon piece I wrote after 9/11 about the carnival of lost souls outside the New York State Armory who were there hoping to reunite with their lost loved ones. And an article I wrote for Legal Affairs about feline cloning, Cats with Ten Lives, was anthologized in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.
But though I loved the freedom of being able to write about sex on college campuses, counterterrorism technology, and everything in between, I decided it was time to develop a reporting specialty. I chose psychology. I already saw the world through a psychological lens. Plus psychology was my undergrad major, and I’d even published my senior thesis—for which I’d gone undercover and infiltrated online neo-Nazi groups—in a psychology journal. Psychology was the perfect choice. So I started carving out a niche for myself as a psychology writer—reading journals, going to conferences, and writing psychology articles for publications like The Washington Post, Slate, and Wired.
In June 2006 I joined the staff of Psychology Today as a Senior Editor, where I generate, assign, and edit features, write articles, and blog. So far I’ve written about how your political orientation is connected to your personality, the personalities of the presidential candidates, and dreaming. I hadn’t even been here a year when The Washington Post made fun of my contributor photo, writing: “And how does Dixit, who is a senior editor at the magazine, describe himself? Well, he doesn’t. But there’s an interesting photo of him on the contributors page. He’s unshaven, standing in water, tickling the snout of a dolphin.”
