reporting & profiles:
2025
Louisiana is executing prisoners again. His case shows the costs - Mother Jones/Bolts collaboration - Chris Duncan has been fighting for decades to prove his innocence. Louisiana’s new governor wants him dead.
As LA burns, business as usual in eviction court - The Nation - a dispatch from the 6th floor of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse as fires tore through Los Angeles this January.
2024
The Reunited - New York Review of Books - As the architects of Trump’s infamous zero tolerance policy return to the White House, what will happen to the families they separated back in 2017 and 2018?
Whose Violence? - New York Review of Books - a dispatch from UCLA’s fleeting Palestinian solidarity encampment, where students experienced hallucinatory violence at the hands of counterprotestors and four different police forces.
Left Apart - New York magazine - Of the more than 5,000 families separated at the border by the Trump administration, around 2,000 still have not been reunited. Those who have face an equally daunting task: coming to terms with radically altered lives amid a still uncertain future. Featured on New York’s One Great Story.
The Prison Journalism Renaissance - The Nation print - an afternoon at the museum with the organization working to elevate incarcerated people’s art and writing. Full Nation archive here.
2023
An Offer You Can’t Refuse - The Drift - How did the R.I.C.O. Act go from silver bullet for the Mafia to atomic bomb deployed against gangs, rappers, and teachers alike?
A Housing Crisis in Paradise - New York Review of Books - resistance to two new housing developments reveals the tangled history of housing politics in Marin County. Ft: a repurposed San Quentin gun range, the birth of antigrowth politics in California, the Human Potential Movement, Proposition 13, the legacy of a wartime shipyard, and Marin’s only black community’s struggle for self-determination. Supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Star Power - The Nation print - Fran Drescher went from playing one of network TV’s working-class heroes to helming Hollywood’s biggest labor union. But can she help heal its divisions in time for a high-stakes contract renegotiation?
Banks for the People - Noema - on the rise of the US public banking movement, and how it could address longstanding inequities that stem from traditional banks’ focus on profit above all else. 2024 LA Press Club finalist in Solutions Journalism.
2022
A future for Susanville - Bolts - When California announced it was closing a prison in rural Northern California, the city sued to keep it open. A long read about how prison expansion in CA has shaped communities across the state, and how we might begin to walk it back. Co-published with Inquest. Selected as a Longreads editors’ pick. Excerpted in the anthology Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change. Full Bolts archive here.
The People’s Mayor is an Abolitionist - Lux - a profile of Oakland activist Cat Brooks’s work against state violence, and a look into the slow, necessary work of developing an alternative response to mental health crises. Lux’s issue 5 cover story.
College Debt - The Drift - USC’s many scandals, the university’s relationship to South LA, and what elite colleges owe their communities.
essays & criticism:
Fighting Times - Aperture - a photographer reconstructs her parents’ radical past, considering what to keep and what to let go. Issue no. 254, “Counterhistories.”
Dream Factory - NYRA - on going to the movies in Los Angeles. For NYRA’s inaugural LA issue.
The case for letting Topanga burn - The New Republic - a look back at Mike Davis’s seminal essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” in light of LA county’s recent decision to ban homeless encampments in high fire-risk areas.
A Star is Born - The Drift - Keith Gessen’s memoir of fatherhood, what happens when the first generation of internet writers grows up, and the ethics of writing about people who can’t write back.
Fiction’s oldest questions - The Nation - a review of Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love.
Forget the old words - LA Review of Books - Patrick Chamoiseau excavates the French penal colony.
High Visibility - LA Review of Books - Medium Cool and the violence of the spectator.
My year in reading, 2022 - The Millions