published work

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)