Journalism

I'm in my 21st year of clear writing about the knotty paths to stability and prosperity with democracy intact as the climate changes. You’ll find stories of a certain age, new and newish work, and more recent blog posts for Yale University below. 

Stories For Strength and Solutions

From February 2020 through summer 2023, I combined my teaching and writing for the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. I helped future managers report stories from multiple perspectives, interrogate data, and write with narrative arc and policy stakes in clear view. I wrote blog posts like this and this, which situate climate policy in real communities.

Group cohesion and courage evolve in all sorts of settings as risk swirls. This essay about baseball and this one about basketball explore the openings.

My articles in the New York Times, Fortune, the Atlantic CityLab and elsewhere home in on the essential factor that can make communities more resilient: open democracy with noisy, pluralist participation. 

These pieces crystallize complex systems science and clarify intricate engineering in buildings, cities, oyster reefs and schools. At times, they venture into global politics. I wrote to professionals in a pre-pandemic office ecosystem about how to take carbon seriously from their desks. I’ve also written about the economic virtue of civic resilience and urban trail systems.

At these pieces’ hearts, you can find people using skill to find other people and forge partnerships that make life more rewarding amid uncertainty.  I also take photographs that capture cities’ fragile chemistry and nature’s potency.