Latest Work

Selected works below published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, FiveThirtyEight, Wired, Popular Science, the Elements section of The New Yorker, and other outlets.

The New York Times

• In Brazil, Animals Cross A Road of No Return

Scientific American
Cover story, June 2018

• Secret Life of the Sun (cover feature)
• Young and Struggling in Science (print feature)
• Will NASA Go Nuclear to Return to the Moon?
• Astronomers Boggle at a Distant Galaxy Devoid of Dark Matter

 

The Atlantic

• Special Project Editor/Lead Writer for a project on the 2017 solar eclipse
• Why Mars is the Best Planet
• Astronomers Are Using Ancient Eclipse Records to Solve a Cosmic Mystery
• An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star

 

FiveThirtyEight

• Welcome to Mars! It’s Horrible Here (lead writer, special project on Mars exploration)
• NASA Is Trying to Save Us From the Sun
• Two Stars Slammed Into Each Other And Solved Half Of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next? (selected for the 2018 edition of The Best American Science & Nature Writing)

 

Quanta Magazine

• Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start
• What Made the Moon? New Ideas Try To Rescue a Troubled Theory
• Why Earth’s Cracked Crust May Be Essential for Life

 

Air & Space

• Eugene Parker’s Journey to the Sun (print feature; exclusive interview with a famed astrophysicist)
• Our New Planet Hunter (print feature)

 

Aeon

• The health effects of a world without darkness (selected for the 2015 edition of The Best American Science & Nature Writing)
• The elastic brain

 

Hakai

• Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada?
• We’ve Been Systematically Underestimating Sea Level Rise

 

Distillations Magazine

• Greetings From Isotopia: An immersive print feature on the new trend of nuclear tourism, and how it is reshaping our experience of the nuclear age.

 

New Scientist

• Bright skies at night: The riddle of the nocturnal sun (recent print feature)
• Mars Trojans may be part of a planet that was destroyed long ago
• Dinosaur-killing asteroid turned planet Earth inside out
• Rosetta’s top seven greatest discoveries
• Black hole made in the lab shows signs of quantum entanglement

 

Popular Science

• Contributing writer 2009-2014
• New Evidence Shows the Moon Formed From Melted Bits of Earth
• Bright Idea: Light Can Make Us Healthy (print feature)

The New Yorker

• The Flying Man

Wired

• The Key to Better Sleep in Space? Some Nice, Colorful Light
• Plasma Lighting Invades Hollywood, Thanks to Nicola Tesla