Introductions
Hi everyone! Wonderful to meet you all and I'm excited for the work ahead together.
I'm Matt Shadbolt. I'm originally from London, but now live just outside of Manhattan, proudly by way of Philadelphia. I’ve lived in America for over 20 years.
I'm a Senior at Penn, majoring in Ancient Religious Cultures and Globalization. By day I'm the Head of Product at NBC News in New York, where I'm responsible for all of NBC News' digital products across NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, The Today Show, E! and Telemundo. Both academically and professionally, I am fascinated by the systems of belief which make the world turn. It's an incredible experience to work in the NBC Newsroom every day, especially over the past few years as you can imagine, and my role there builds upon almost four years prior where I worked at The New York Times. I am particularly close to NBC's election and global conflict coverage at the moment as we work towards the election, and I feel a great sense of mission and motivation in helping millions of our users make sense of the world.
I'm a dad, husband, survivor, gamer, movie junkie, vinyl collector, sushi lover, Browns diehard, Star Wars nerd, Metalhead and Mini Cooper Driver. Outside of work I can usually be found at https://matthewshadbolt.com. In my spare time I love to working on personal design projects, and my current passion is making work with generative Ai tools such as MidJourney and ChatGPT, which you can see more of at: https://www.artificialmatt.com. At Penn I write extensively for https://www.thepennmoviegoer.com. as well as design and run the club's site, and I've also built and run https://www.penndems.org.
While I write all day in email, messages and status updates, little of it is creative, and my written passion is for telling stories. I love the big, epic sweeping stories of mythology and belief, stories passed down orally and which still survive today in written form such as The Odyssey, The Theogony and the origin stories of faith. I mainly read historical non-fiction recreationally, but when I do read fiction, recently I've enjoyed Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, and have spent this past few months working my way through many of Jorge Luis Borges' books, especially Labyrinths and The Aleph. I especially enjoy the work of diarists, and have been enjoying the wonderfully expansive diaries of Monty Python’s Michael Palin this year, and see myself in a lot of his writing. I also love the movies, and will always stop time for anything by Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Overall I'm more of a reader and a viewer than a writer, but I'd love to change that. My life's aspiration is to be able to independently write all day.
Over the past few years, I've been starting to write down the stories of my life for my teenage daughter to read one day. The stories of how I came to live in America. The stories of surviving cancer. The stories of work. I'm collecting them for her at https://www.anthologymatt.com. I love to write these, but don't do it nearly as much as I'd like to. Many of my recent reviews for the Penn Moviegoer have been strongly autobiographical. I've no technical or academic background in writing, and any craft I may have is more a consequence of determination and perseverance over many years. A feeling that not writing, somehow doesn't allow me to be the best me I can possibly be.
I look forward to the conversations ahead together.
