After graduation, he worked as an advertising copywriter, winning 11 Clio Awards, and three One Show Gold Pencils for his work on corporate and political advertising campaigns, for clients including BMW, FedEx, Michael Dukakis, and Sony.
He was a contributing editor at Spy, worked for Howell Raines writing editorials for The New York Times, and has written the (largely) humorous "New Yorker's Diary" for The New York Observer since 1994. He has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1995, and a columnist at Strategy+Business magazine since 2000. His work has also appeared online at Salon.com and Inside.com.
In 2007, while continuing to write screenplays in Los Angeles and contribute to Vanity Fair in New York, he began producing movies in China. His first film, 2009's Hóng hé (Red River), the story of the aftermath of the Vietnam War, opened to great critical and commercial acclaim in China. Directed by Jiarui Zhang, it stars Nick Cheung, Danny Lee, and Jingchu Zhang.[3]
Feirstein has also written four video games in the Bond series. In 2004, Feirstein wrote the critically acclaimed Everything or Nothing for developer and publisher Electronic Arts. More recently, Feirstein adapted the 1957 Ian Fleming novel and 1963 film From Russia with Love for a video game of the same name, utilizing the voice and likeness of Sean Connery. In 2010, Activision announced that he would contribute an original story for the next videogame in the series, Blood Stone, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC platforms,[6] along with the remake of GoldenEye 007. As one of the original writers of the GoldenEye film, Feirstein's work on the new game involved updating the plot to a modern setting and in the style of Daniel Craig's interpretation of the character.