HOT AUTHORS SERIES // Part 1: Christopher Koulouris Brings Humanity to Celeb Gossip

Photo: Kevin LewOn Friday, September 16th, we're teaming up with Canteen Magazine to celebrate the launch of their latest issue. For issue #7, Canteen's paired 16 white-hot authors with 16 renowned photographers, a number of which will be in attendance for a panel discussion and (of course) a party--get all the details here. To get you better acquainted, we'll be running profiles on a handful of the contributors & presenters. 

In Part 1, we talk to Chief Editor at Scallywag & Vagabond, Christopher Koulouris.

Most Wall Street traders don't seem to hold aspirations of the literary kind. Though after Christopher Koulouris retired from the trading floor in 2003 (when he was 36 years old, no less) he began dabbling in writing. Cut to 2008 when Koulouris founded pop culture site, Scallywag & Vagabond.

“I was kind of a dilletante,” he says. “I traveled a lot. I wrote. I was invited to be part of a sort of cultural collective, and I started really seeing their thought process.” Feeling like he wanted to pursue some kind of writing, he asked a friend of his, an editor at a men’s fashion magazine, what the next big thing was going to be. The answer? Celebrity gossip, of course.

But Koulouris didn’t want to do the traditional, sensational tabloid racket. “Whatever I do, it has to be art. I have to be a writer,” he tells us. So when he devised Scallywag & Vagabond, his goal was to create a site that not only reported the gossip, but would simultaneously try and investigate the societal forces that influenced it. Koulouris has no problem poking fun, as long as that’s not the end of the story. He wants to inject humanity into his subject matter--and he’s quick to remind anyone who asks that celebrities are, in fact, humans.

“As a trader, we looked at trends,” he explains. Obviously, news and gossip sites rely upon trends. They (and our interest in them) are part of larger cultural shifts and mores, and those are what really grabs Koulouris. In short, he’s not just out for a cheap laugh or an optimized, if inaccurate, headline that's sole purpose is to grab page views.

Next on his agenda: To launch a TV channel, his idea of the thinking man’s E! Network. Given his success already in careers number one and two, we feel that shouldn't be a problem.

-- Layla Schlack