Levine is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Fortune on the subject of music and the music business. Other freelance work includes features on pop culture and business for Vanity Fair, Wired, Playboy, Business 2.0, and Spin. He was a Senior Editor at Wired and at New York, where he edited features about politics, crime, pop culture, and wrote music reviews. He also held editing positions Details, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere, including HotWired, where he created the music section for the startup online publication. He received an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship to report from Germany in 2005. He has a BA from Brandeis University and an MS from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.