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My reporting, essays, and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Common, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Harvard’s Nieman Reports, The New York Times, Orion, Scientific American, Slate, The Verge, and others.

reporting

Meet the States Using Public Funds to Save Local News
Nieman Reports, Harvard Nieman Foundation for Journalism
In the face of federal inaction, state-level experiments to fund community-based outlets are expanding.

Journalism Is Essential
Nieman Reports, Harvard Nieman Foundation for Journalism
Covid-19 is threatening to extinguish local media — and fueling bold proposals to fund its long-term future.

Let’s (Not) Talk About Sex
Boston Magazine
No, it’s not 1950, but public school parents are once more at odds over what to teach kids when it comes to the birds and the bees. Here we go again…

If Social Media Can Be Unsafe for Kids, What Happens in VR?
Slate, “Future Tense”
Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that Facebook will be a “metaverse company” in five years. What does that mean for kids? Cited by Sen. Markey, Rep. Castor, and Rep. Trahan in February 2022 letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan.

The Risk Makers
Type Investigations and OneZero
Viral hate, election interference, and hacked accounts: inside the tech industry’s decades-long failure to reckon with risk.

“We Can’t Only Be Mad at Facebook”
Nieman Reports, Harvard Nieman Foundation for Journalism
Inside the journalistic effort to counter false information designed to suppress voting and cast doubt on the election.

The Secret Rules of the Internet
Type Investigations and The Verge
The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech. 2017 Mirror Award Winner, for Best Single Story. Best read at The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Foreign Policy, and Longreads. Cited by the Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale law reviews, among others.

How Do You Fix Facebook’s Moderation Problem?
The Verge
Figure out what Facebook is.

How Science Explains Trump’s Grip on White Males
Scientific American
Research on risk perception can help us understand the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.

The Unsafety Net
The Atlantic
Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn—which makes female users feel anything but free. Featured by The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, The Independent (UK), The Nation, NPR’s On Point, The New York Daily News, and Slate, among others.

Media, Company, Behemoth: What, exactly, is Facebook?
The Verge
Facebook won’t call itself a media company.​ ​Is it time to reimagine journalism for the digital age?

Scientist, Uninterrupted
Terrain
A meeting with Dr. Theo Colborn, pioneer in the science of hormone disrupting chemicals.

Teaching Kids About Sexual Assault
The Atlantic
At increasingly young ages, programs aim to teach children about healthy relationships and create places where parents, teachers, and children feel they can speak up about abuse. Featured by The Journalism Center on Children and Families. Nominated for a 2013 PPFA Maggie Award for Media Excellence and featured by the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation

essays

Riding High
Travel + Leisure
Andalusia’s Donaña National Park—a wild expanse of wetlands, juniper-carpeted sand dunes, forest, and heath—is too diverse for a drive-by, too vast to explore on foot. This sweep of southern Spain, fragrant with eucalyptus and orange, rosemary, and thyme, is best seen from the saddle.

 

The Geology of Misery
Literary Hub
What Philip Larkin and Ted Lasso (and Science) Tell Us About Trauma: On Breaking the Cycle of Individual and Collective Dehumanization.

Toward a Wider View of “Nature Writing”
The Los Angeles Review of Books
The landscape of writing about the environment, about nature, is expanding beyond long-standing genre boundaries.

What’s in a Name?
Literary Hub
On the intrinsic power of what people call (and miscall) you.

The Power of Awe
Orion
“Awe is as consequential to human adaptation as the stress response, which we take very seriously,” say researchers. “This isn’t just wishy-washy pollyannaishness, but part of our human nervous system.”

Pants on Fire: The Genre That Cannot Be Named
The Millions
Given everything we know, why do nonfiction writers continue to make stuff up and not tell readers? Given everything we know, why do readers continue to feel betrayed and outraged when nonfiction writers do this? Featured by the L.A. Times’ “Jacket Copy” and The Rumpus.

From Orwell to Trump: When Does Egoism Become Narcissism?
Literary Hub
If a writer cannot be understood or recognized on the page, he or she is, in literary terms, “unreliable.” But what if readers perceive the writer himself to be unreliable? 

Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction
Assay: A Journal for Nonfiction Studies
Every writer meets reader through narrating ego, and it deserves exploration from an egoic stance, to borrow from Oxford, of “conscious thinking subject…responsible for reality testing.” Because, right now, the reality is there’s an awful lot of talk about who is telling the “truth” and who is not.

fiction

Speed of Flight
The Common, Issue No. 19.

books & anthologies

The Outside Story
Northern Woodlands Press

reviews

Navigating the All Trails App
Appalachia Journal

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