Zinoman began his career at
Time Out New York, where he became the theater editor in 2001. After writing freelance stories for
The New York Times, he was hired to become the On Stage and Off theater columnist in 2003. In 2011, he became the comedy critic for
The New York Times, a newly created position, and, two years later, he published "Searching for Dave Chappelle", a
Kindle single about comedian
Dave Chappelle's retreat from public life. In 2010, he recapped the third season of the HBO series
True Blood for
Slate and argued that the series might not be getting the critical attention it deserved because of an "old elite snobbishness toward lowbrow genres." In 2011, he published the non-fiction book
Shock Value, which describes how horror films changed in the late 1960s to become more brutal, realistic, and auteur-driven, as opposed to the older, campier films based on Gothic melodrama. The book was an outgrowth of an article he had written for
Vanity Fair. He has spoken further about horror films as an interviewee in the 2013 documentary film
Birth of the Living Dead, which tracks the legacy of
Night of the Living Dead. In 2017, he co-hosted the television show "Theater Talk." == Personal life ==