Stories
Features
Animal Passions
The New Yorker
What deer vasectomies can tell us about our relationship with wildlife.
Anthologized in 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology (MacMillan, 2022)
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?
The New York Times Magazine (cover story)
The virus’s strangest symptom has opened new doors to understanding our most neglected sense.
(Winner of the Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; Featured by The Daily on The Sunday Read).
Cherry Work
The New York Times Magazine
Twenty-four billion cherries need to be picked by hand — even in a pandemic. A look, through one crop and the people who make it possible, at the frailty of our food system.
(Winner of the International Labour Organization’s Global Media Competition on Labour Migration; Anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2021)
The First Shot
Wired
The race for a coronavirus vaccine, behind the scenes (and under the skin).
(Longreads’ Best of 2020: Writing on Covid-19)
American Sphinx
The New Yorker
The world’s largest monument, decades in the making and still unfinished, is meant to be a tribute to the Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse. But what does it really symbolize?
The Launch
The California Sunday Magazine
A profile of an apple.
(Longform Best of 2019: Science and Nature)
Planetary Damages
The New York Times Magazine
Climate change threatens his home in Peru, so he sued a German utility. What does liability look like when the harm in question is as vast and complicated as a warmer planet?
(notable, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2020)
The Deported Americans
The California Sunday Magazine (cover story)
What happens to the American children of undocumented parents when they “return” to a country they don’t know?
(Featured on All Things Considered and Marketplace)
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here
The New York Times Magazine (cover story)
What happens—and who notices—when an invisible fact of life goes missing?
(Anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2019; one of Longform’s Best Science Stories of 2018)
Paper Tiger
The New Yorker
What the obsessive search for an extinct (or not) animal says about us.
(Anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, 2019; 2nd place in “Outstanding Feature Story” from Society of Environmental Journalists’ Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment; notable, Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2019; supported by The Pulitzer Center)
Did Covid Change How We Dream?
The New York Times Magazine (cover story)
(Featured by The Daily on The Sunday Read)
The Teenagers at the End of the World
The New York Times Magazine
A profile of climate activist Jamie Margolin.
Force of Nature
Wired
The carbon-capture technology we’re missing out on.
"Will They Take Me, Too?"
The New York Times Magazine
More than a thousand children are counting on Nora Sándigo to become their guardian if their undocumented parents are deported.
The Disenrolled
The New York Times Magazine
A new chapter in the long, strange story of who "counts" as Native American.
(Supported by the Reporting Award from NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute)
Unclaimed
The California Sunday Magazine (cover story)
Two countries, thousands of families, and a sixteen-year quest to identify a silent man in a bed.
(Winner, 2017 Livingston Award for National Reporting)
How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her
Wired (cover story)
A horror story of trust and exposure in the Internet age.
Under Water
The New York Times Magazine
How insurance fails when rising seas turn risk into certainty.
Who Is John Frum?
Topic
For an issue on belief, I visited an island in Vanuatu famous for its “cargo cult.”
When I Die
Harper's Magazine
How a medical oncologist who helped dozens of his patients end their lives faced his own terminal diagnosis.
(Honorable mention, AACR June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism from the American Association for Cancer Research; "notable," Best American Essays, 2017)
Homeward
The California Sunday Magazine
To escape oil and colonization, a rainforest people tried fleeing deeper into the jungle. When the outside world followed, they sent a 10-year-old boy to learn its ways.
(Finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Journalism and the Livingston Award in International Reporting)
The Deepest Dig
The California Sunday Magazine
The bottom of the ocean is the most remote, least understood place on Earth. But that isn't stopping us from mining it.
(The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2015).
Collapse
Seattle Met Magazine
It was Saturday. It was 10:37 in the morning. And then the world collapsed. Survival and sacrifice after Washington's deadliest landslide.
(1st place in general magazine reporting, Society of Professional Journalists, Northwest Chapter; Nominated for the National City and Regional Magazine Award in Feature writing.)
The Messengers
Pacific Standard (cover story)
On dying albatross and an artist's quest to face the grief of environmental collapse.
(Honorable Mention for Outstanding Feature Story from the Society of Environmental Journalists)
17 Shots in Pasco
Seattle Met Magazine
The police shooting of a Mexican field worker prompted a reckoning in a Washington farming town.
(1st place in general magazine reporting, Society of Professional Journalists, Northwest Chapter)
The Mending
bioGraphic
Argentina’s vast Iberá wetlands lost many of their largest species decades ago. Can an audacious rewilding plan rebuild a bygone world?
When We Are Called to Part
Published by The Atavist
A year in a Hawaiian leprosarium: "The absorbing, affecting, and often funny story of life in a the last years of a rapidly vanishing community."
Kindle version here, Audiobook here, print version here
(Anthologized in Love And Ruin, Norton 2016)
Shorter writing
Slippery Truths
The New Yorker
To lose the eel is one grief; to lose the eel question, another.
Your Body is a Wonderland
The New Yorker
Rethinking the science of skin.
The Air in Here
The New Yorker
The many ways the world breathes together.
Good Years
The New Yorker
We’ve had great success extending life. What about ending it?
Sky High
The New York Times Magazine
By pointing their cameras upward, they unintentionally captured themselves.
Midnight Oil
The New York Times Magazine
A protest song about degrading work becomes a rousing call to do even more work after that.
House Music
The New York Times Magazine
On the novel coronavirus, and singing in the dark times.
How to Move Your Elephant During a Pandemic
The New York Times
“Are we only going to provide better conditions? Or do we want to do something a little more profound?”
Lost World
The New York Times Magazine
On the way we share an apocalyptic age.
How Mosquitos Changed Everything
The New Yorker
They've ravaged humanity and derailed history. And mosquitoes aren't finished with us, yet.
The Lives They Lived: Baby Orca
The New York Times Magazine
Memorializing a life that lasted just a half hour.
Homeless Homes
The California Sunday Magazine
When a city gets so expensive, even the houses move out.
A Shot in the Dark
The California Sunday Magazine
In hopes of saving one owl species, scientists are killing another.
Reflections in Steel
The California Sunday Magazine
Fifteen years and thousands of miles away from the the fall of the World Trade Center, a small town wonders how to remember it.
Listening for Gunshots
The California Sunday Magazine
A portrait of America in loud noises.
Saving the Kiwikiu in the Extinction Capital of the World
Audubon Magazine
Moving mountains for a little round bird.
The Search for Stillness at the Heart of Biathlon
The New York Times Magazine
The Sisters Who Treat the Untreatable
The New York Times Magazine
Gillian Laub's photo series on death and comfort.
Giant Squid Reappears
The New York Times
The Return of the Platypuses
The New York Times - The Great Read
The Last Stand of the Last Great Wilderness
Sierra Magazine
Rafting across the contested landscape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Sinking World
MATTER
A sea of bones and a moment's decision to leave home forever — A dispatch from disappearing islands in Papua New Guinea.
(Chosen as a best science story of 2014, Longreads.com and National Geographic.com)