I'm a journalist who writes for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Mag, and other magazines. My articles have been adapted for the screen, won a National City and Regional Magazine award for feature writing, and been cited as notable in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing. I served as a co-executive producer for the 2022 Netflix docuseries Worst Roommate Ever, which was inspired by my 2018 New York Magazine article of the same name.
Featured Work
"Worst Roommate Ever"
An investigation for New York Magazine into the tactics—and the tragedy—of America's most accomplished serial squatter.
"How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels"
A profile of John and Mike Mew, a father-son orthodontic duo in the United Kingdom whose theory that the Industrial Revolution gave rise to rampant crooked teeth has made them pariahs in their field — and earned them an enormous following on the internet
"The Irish Novel That's So Good People Were Scared to Translate it"
In 1949, Máirtín Ó Cadhain published what is widely considered to be the Irish language's greatest novel. Why did it take almost 70 years for it to be translated into English? For The New Yorker's Page-turner blog, I investigated.
“Hunted By the Mob”
The Italian writer Roberto Saviano has lived in hiding since the 2006 publication of his mafia exposé Gomorrah, which brought him international fame—and credible threats on his life by the mob. I profiled him in 2015, as he lived in self-described “exile” in New York.
“Up All Night”
All over the world, animals have started to become more active at night. I wrote about why, for The Atlantic.
“Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools To Respect African-American English”
In 1996, the school board of Oakland, California, approved the use of “Ebonics” as a tool for helping students learn to read. The decision was met with national outrage and quickly withdrawn. But new research suggests Oakland was onto something.
