The Salt, NPR’s crispy new food blog, had a soft launch in September and has been quietly gaining steam since then. While the lovely April Fulton is on maternity leave, I am hosting, editing and writing for the blog and trying to maintain a flavorful mix of the heady topics that our ever-complex, ever-changing food [...]
I spent most of March and the first part of April covering the Fukushima nuclear crisis for NPR. While a lot of the work I did was behind the scenes, I wrote one featurey piece on some of TEPCO’s most avoidable mistakes. There were loads of fluky incidents precipitated by the tsunami that the electric [...]
I wrote captions for a slideshow a while back for National Geographic’s water series; it’s called China’s Wetland Revolution. The biggest attraction is the photos by Sean Gallagher, who did a pretty remarkable job documenting a not-so-sexy environmental issue — disappearing wetlands — in a country not so keen on dispensing information on environmental predicaments. [...]
Last week I wrote a blog post for NPR’s Shots that went viral. The post, entitled Why Bacon Is The Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians, was based on my accumulated observations over many years that bacon makes turncoats out of vegetarians. Now, many people have asked me if I am or was ever a vegetarian, [...]
A piece I reported back in September in Juarez, Mexico appeared on TheAtlantic.com this month. I discovered during my visit there that there is a small but vital movement of citizens eager to refashion their city into a more trusting, law-abiding place. The violence rages on, however, and the city remains the most violent in [...]
Here’s another reason to save those bacon drippings: They can be converted into diesel fuel, that is if you have the the equipment handy to hydrogenate the fats and turn them into renewable diesel. Meat conglomerate Tyson Foods would like to see more Americans driving on lard if a new venture with Syntroleum works out. [...]
I’ve neglected to post a few stories that were published over the last couple of months and so in the spirit of holiday catch up I’ll share them now. In September, the CQ Global Researcher, a monthly report from the CQ Press, published my report on Crime in Latin America. It’s by no means definitive [...]
I’m working at NPR these days and have contributed some wordy bits to the web site in the form of blogs posts and sidebars to radio stories. Today I took a jab at the health conditions of the incredibly courageous and fortunate Chilean miners for NPR’s health blog, Shots. Earlier in the week, I wrote [...]
My story on bedbugs is now up on Slate. This story was inspired by a series of run-ins with bedbugs — both real and assumed — in Baltimore and Washington, DC. Writing this piece helped reaffirm for me how little we know about household biology (who exactly are the tiny critters we co-habitate with?) and [...]
Friend Monica Campbell has a nice piece in Nieman Reports, a site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard where Campbell was a fellow last year, about our respective experiences finding funding through university research centers. She describes her own work with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School [...]