reporting & profiles:
New York Review of Books - Whose Violence? A look at UCLA’s fleeting Palestinian solidarity encampment, and the hallucinatory violence students and other supporters experienced at the hands of counterprotestors and four different police forces.
New York magazine - Left Apart - 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.
New York Review of Books - A Housing Crisis in Paradise - resistance to two new housing developments reveals the tangled history of housing politics in Marin County. Featuring: 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
The Drift - An Offer You Can’t Refuse - 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?
Lux - The People’s Mayor is an Abolitionist - 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.
Bolts - A future for Susanville - 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 forthcoming anthology Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change.
Bolts - The anti-carceral feminist who would be DA - Pamela Price, a civil rights lawyer running for DA in California’s Alameda County, sees criminal justice reform as gender justice. Can she resolve the role’s contradictions? A collaboration with The Nation. Full Bolts archive here.
Noema - Banks for the People - 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.
The Nation - Star Power - 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?
The New Republic - Why farmworkers were left out of Striketober - An unexpected veto, and a UFW pilgrimage.
The New Republic - The E.U.’s criminalization of refugee solidarity work - They’re humanitarian volunteers working at Europe’s edges. The EU considers them human smugglers.
essays & criticism:
Aperture Magazine - Fighting Times - A photographer reconstructs her parents’ radical past, considering what to keep and what to let go. Issue no. 254, “Counterhistories.”
New York Review of Architecture - Dream Factory - on going to the movies in Los Angeles. For NYRA’s inaugural LA issue.
The New Republic - The case for letting Topanga burn - 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.
The Drift - A Star is Born - 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.
The Drift - College Debt - USC’s many scandals, the university’s relationship to South LA, and what elite colleges owe their communities.
The Nation - Fiction’s oldest questions - a review of Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Forget the old words - Patrick Chamoiseau excavates the French penal colony.
LA Review of Books - High Visibility - Medium Cool and the violence of the spectator.
The Millions - My year in reading, 2022.