published work

A story for Mother Jones, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, about border surveillance, AI, and the future of the US-Mexico border that is very much already here.

For a long time, being a journalist was my dream job—a moral pursuit, I felt, to grapple with and amplify the world’s crises. But as time passed I noticed its cracks, its failures, its fissures. Here’s an essay about that in Lihub.

My ancestors had left Greece; now, a hundred years later, millions were desperate to get here. An excerpt from A Map of Future Ruins in Lithub

For years I have worked as an administrator at an Oakland public school for newcomer immigrant youth learning English. Here, teachers teach sequencing language—words like first, next, later, finally, last—so that students can assign an order to their sentences and ideas. An excerpt from A Map of Future Ruins in the LA Review of Books.

With a record number of families opting to homeschool in the wake of the pandemic, an enduring American question has resurfaced: What, exactly, is school for? An essay on homeschooling for The Believer.

Who is really to blame for the fire that destroyed the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos? A story on the camp, the fire and the six refugees accused of arson in spite of scant evidence, for The Guardian Longread.

With the right equipment and a little luck, stealing a tree from a swath of land as remote and vast as the Olympic National Forest should have been easy enough… A story for Harper’s Magazine about timber theft, a 2018 poaching case involving a massive Pacific Northwest wildfire, and the scientists using DNA to track illegal logging.

A story about the perils of press freedom in Greece for the New York Times, with Lydia Emmanouilidou

Who was this guy, supposedly rich but obviously strapped for cash, who was borrowing large sums of money and trying to get her mother to invest in Connecticut real estate? “Nelson Roth,” Julia said to me, when I was passing through town that fall, “is the fakest fucking name I’ve ever heard.” A piece on an infamous Upper East Side romance scammer for The New Yorker.

A story about Greece’s shadow policy of “pushbacks” — extra judicious refoulement of refugees who have already made it to European soil— and how this tactic for keeping out refugees is spreading all over the world.

I drove to Oregon because I wanted to see the future. Our rapidly changing climate vexes me, keeps me up at night—perhaps you’ve felt this, too—and recently I’d become particularly preoccupied with trees. A story for Mother Jones on the scientists trying to help forests migrate so that they don’t disappear.

During the pandemic, our relationship to the animals living around us changed. A story for Harper’s about a war between some people and their neighborhood crows, a friendship with backyard hummingbirds, and what really happens when we talk to animals.

What happens when immigrant-rights advocates reach a breaking point?

An investigation for VQR.

A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?

A story for the Atavist Magazine

There are more border walls being built on earth than ever before in the history of the nation state. Here’s a story for Harper’s about a tiny, much-contested border wall in arctic Norway. (Included in Best American Travel Writing 2018)

A New York Time Opinion piece about the high human and economic costs of US immigration detention.

For the New York Times Magazine, a look into the limitations of how the Americans With Disabilities Act is enforced — and who pays the price.

A story for VICE on the unaccompanied minors working in the California agricultural system

An investigation for VQR into “unaccompanied minors” and the machinery of the US immigration system designed to find these children, arrest them, lock them up, and deport them back home.

An essay on solitude, snow, and finding reasons to write.

A story about an indigenous community in rural Alaska incorporating their language and cultural practices into formal public schooling

My favorite activity, my only faithful daily ritual, is to check the mail. Here’s an essay in Lithub about the magic of the U.S. postal service.