Recent
“The greatest trees of Los Angeles” The Los Angeles Times | a search for and celebration of great trees
“A Chatbot is Secretly Doing My Job” The Atlantic | On creating serviceable copy using ChatGPT
“The Great LA Dumpling Drama” Eater | On malls and mall food, Glendale and Los Angeles, democracy and Din Tai Fung
“L’Rain Makes a Way Out of No Way” NYT Magazine | How the artist Taja Cheek creates her songs out of found sound.
“The Lost List” The Sewanee Review | On engines of disappearance and disorientation, selected by Alexander Chee for The Best American Essays 2022
“Death and the River” LitHub | A close reading of a Scottish border ballad
“Going Deep” The Virginia Quarterly Review | On life lived underground
“Who Are These Kids, and What Are They Doing to Jazz?” NYT Magazine | DOMi and J.D. Beck are so young and virtuosic that it feels as if they must be kidding you
”The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety” The Atlantic | a profile of Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
”Waterlogged” The Virginia Quarterly Review | on beaver dams, and imitating the architecture of nature
”Feel the Love” The Observer | a profile of John Legend
”The $60 Gadget That’s Changing Electronic Music” NYT Magazine | a little synthesizer and a funny Swedish company
“In the Line of Fire” Robb Report | private crews and the Malibu burn (winner of best investigative magazine feature for Los Angeles Press Club’s SoCal Journalism Awards)
”Separation Anxiety” Popular Science | the story of a bolt built to fly into space and explode (a Best American Science and Nature Writing selection)
"The Little Pepper That Could" Eater | on the often overlooked and under appreciated excellence of the Fresno chile
"The Accent Whisperers of Hollywood" The New York Times Magazine | a dialect coach and how to sound American
"Long Way Home" The Virginia Quarterly Review | my ten year correspondence with a solitary sailor
Essays
"The Rat Paths of New York" The New York Times Magazine | on the commuting habits of urban wildlife
"Mysterious American Cat" The Virginia Quarterly Review | on mountain lions among us
"Why Pop-Ups Are Popping Off" GQ | on temporary restaurants, temporary spaces, impermanent economies
"An Encounter with a Giant Kangaroo Rat" The New Yorker | a quest to find a strange rodent on a wild plain
"Letter of Recommendation: Bushnell Trophy Cam" The New York Times Magazine | on wild critters, at night, in our yard
"The Art of Escape" Longreads/Killscreen | on incarceration and video games
"Why Am I Obsessed With a Cellphone Game About Collecting Cats?" The New York Times Magazine | on feline ownership
"The Desperate Search for the Next Great American Idea" Fortune | on invention, economics, and unequal opportunity
"Disaster Management" The Awl | on prepping, and postponing
"Hammacher Schlemmer in the age of Google ads" The Los Angeles Times | a catalog appreciation
"How I rented a piece of a river in a never-ending western drought" The Guardian | on owning a right to water in the West
+ radio versions "How Water is Bought and Sold" & "He Bought the Water"
"Consider the 'For Your Consideration' Billboard" The New Yorker | on LA's surest season
Profiles
"Calling Art" The Virginia Quarterly Review | on Art Laboe, late night deejay legend
”The Life and Death of Grimes” WSJ Magazine | a profile of the artist Claire Boucher
"The Scarily Profitable Hits of Jason Blum" The New York Times Magazine | on a horror movie producer's arthouse approach
”Nonny de la Peña” WSJ Magazine | a profile of a virtual reality pioneer
"The Tears of Rose-Lynn Fisher" Southwest The Magazine | an artist photographs her tears under a microscope
"Conner Goes to Hollywood" The Verge | on a YouTube star newly arrived out West
"Can Billionaire Robert Bigelow Create A Life For Humans in Space?" Popular Science | an inflatable spaceship entrepreneur
"Bill Nye Fights Back" Popular Science | on the Science Guy's return to public life
Science & TECH
"The Cancer Almanac" The New York Times Magazine | classifying cancers (nominated for a National Magazine Award)
"All Queens Must Die" The Verge | on an ant eradication, invasive species, and islands
"On PCR, LSD, and Science as a Wild Ride" BOOM | on drugs, discovery, and DNA
"Waze and the Traffic Panopticon" The New Yorker | on addressing traffic from the bottom up
"Understanding Facebook's Lost Generation of Teens" Fast Company | on the kids, and how they're all right
"A Brief History of Failure" The New York Times Magazine | a timeline of failed technologies
"'Le Selfie'" The New York Times Magazine | on technology, and how it shapes language
"Rdio's Death and How We Platform Now" Vanity Fair | on learning to love, then leave, in the digital age
"The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop" MIT Technology Review | on a transportation pipe dream
"You Here for the Oculus Gang Bang, Too?" Matter | on virtual reality pornography
music
"Out of My Head" The New York Times Magazine | on Charli XCX's particular position in pop
"Barok Main" The New York Times Magazine | on the composers Mica Levi and Oliver Coates
”Comeback Kid” The New York Times Magazine | on Sharon Van Etten’s new sound, new album, new life
business
”New Belgium Brewery’s employees think like owners. Because they are” Fast Company | on the benefits of employee ownership
"The Incredible Shrinking Airplane" Popular Science | why, as airplanes get larger and larger, do they feel smaller and smaller?
"The Woman Driving Patagonia To Be (even more) Radical" Fortune | on Rose Marcario, Patagonia CEO
"How Sonos Built the Perfect Wireless Speaker" Bloomberg Businessweek | on sound, and vision
"Meet your next surgeon: Dr. Robot" Fortune | on robot-assisted surgery
"Tesla Autopilot" MIT Technology Review | on driving a (sort of) self-driving car
"How viral video companies can turn pizza rats into boatloads of cash" The Guardian | on the new new content economy
"The Great Big Question About Really Tiny Materials" Fortune | on nanomaterials
Reviews
"The Best Trekking Poles" Wirecutter | a review; also on walking and falling
"William Finnegan surfs the meaning of his 'Barbarian Days' Los Angeles Times | a book review
"Read This In Case of Emergency" Slate | a winter wilderness blitz through various survival guides
Interviews
"Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason" Paris Review
"Economists, Biologists and Skrillex on How To Predict the Future" The New York Times Magazine
"The New Making It" The New York Times Magazine | how artists forge careers today
Miscellany
Awl True Stories: The Bookie & Night Court & Lucky Louie (a dog story)
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