Neil Young in The New York Times Magazine in which the writer described his youngest son's struggle with a sensory processing disorder. Books In the spring of 2008, Samuels published Only Love Can Break Your Heart—a collection of his journalism—along with The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue. The latter was based on his 2001 profile of the university confidence man James Hogue, in The New Yorker. In 2015, a French translation of "The Runner" was published under the title "Mentir A Perdre Haleine". In 2018, Samuels published a double-sided French language collection of two decades of his journalism, "Seul L'Amour Peut Te Briser Le Coeur," , which received laudatory coverage in the French press, who dubbed Samuels the inventor of "neo-gonzo journalism" . Style In The New York Observer, critic Matt Haber called Samuels "a master of the new old journalism." In the same publication, critic Michael Washburn described Samuels' work in The Runner and Only Love as "thrilling"; "With an intelligence and unsparing lucidity reminiscent of Joan Didion, Mr. Samuels has written some of the best long-form literary journalism of the past decade." In a long review essay in The Nation, the critic John Palattella wrote that Samuels' achievement was "staggering" and compared his work favorably to that of Didion and Tom Wolfe: "Like Didion, Samuels investigates the vortex of American life, a feeling of weightlessness and existential drift that can swallow people whole, but he reports on it in an entirely different manner." Reviewing The Runner for The New York Times, Keith Gessen wrote "Samuels is an elite narrative journalist, a master at teasing out the social and moral implications of the smallest small talk." Writing separately in the same publication about Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Jascha Hoffman described the collection as "a tribute to the twin American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit" and the author as "a brilliant reporter who has made a career of observing 'our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch.'" In the Los Angeles Times, critic Richard Rayner cited the author's "wonderful feeling for the weirdness and truths of self-contained worlds"; he continued, "the writing is Joseph Mitchell-meets-Elmore Leonard, and a whole subculture comes to life. ... Samuels is heir to an American tradition." James Hannaham wrote in The Village Voice that Samuels "has