During his journalism career, Nobile has written for
New York Press, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Spin,
Spy Magazine,
Esquire,
Newsday,
The Weekly Standard,
and The New York Post among other publications. He wrote on the idea of "positive incest" in a 1977 article on Warren Farrell in Penthouse
that questioned the incest taboo. He was an editor, along with Eric Nadler, of Penthouse Forum.'' talk radio host
Don Imus, historians
Doris Kearns Goodwin and
David McCullough, and President
Harry S. Truman. In 1982, he wrote in
Penthouse Forum of
penis size research. He argued that data from
Kinsey Institute studies showed that black penises were longer than white penises. This was based on a sample of 2,376 "white college men", 143 "non-white college men" and 59 "black college men". In 1984 he was sued by Shere Hite for his
Penthouse Forum editorial that said that she should be driven "out of the erogenous zones". The $15 million case was settled out of court, but Nobile did not issue an apology or retraction. In 1990, he reported in
The Village Voice what was described as a "key story" of a former altar boy's sexual relationship with the Rev.
Bruce Ritter of
Covenant House. This was one of the earliest reported cases of sexual abuse among religious in institutional settings.
Clarence Page responded in the
Chicago Tribune that Nobile was missing the point of the effect of Haley's work and noted that the author had always said parts were fiction. Page wrote: "I think he [Nobile] missed the larger, more important truth. If
Roots was a hoax, it was a hoax Americans wanted desperately to believe, which says something more important about Americans than anything Nobile says about Haley." Nobile's 2013
New York Post article asserted that President
John Kennedy and
Jackie Kennedy had sex on
Air Force One on the day before his assassination. He based this report on a conversation he had with Kennedy biographer
William Manchester, who did not want to be revealed as the source while he was alive. Nobile claimed that Jackie Kennedy Onassis suppressed publication of his book on the president's "Don Juanism" while she was an editor at Doubleday. ==History teacher==