I write, report, and teach to inspire group action on collective problems.
This focus grew from many years of reporting on cities, climate change, real estate, and the tangles therein. My 2011 Times Op-Ed, "New York's Green Grid," helped crystallize my focus. We're grasping for new agreements in complex systems. Stories and workshops shed light on hopeful links.
I’ve taught undergrads at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering how to fill their technical writing with storytelling, causes, effects and questions. In spring 2018, I taught a Discourse section of Business and Its Publics, a requisite first-year undergraduate course at NYU's Stern School of Business. Before NYU, I taught the capstone class in Pratt Institute's Sustainable Environmental Systems program from 2011 through 2017.
From February 2020 until June 2023 I served as News Editor at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, where I helped students write actionable stories on clean energy and conservation finance. More broadly, I focus on empowering and encouraging people to engage in and with the real world.
I grew up in New York City, as did my wife (and parents and grandparents and sister). I live in a vertical small town in Lower Manhattan with my wife and two kids.