[since you're wondering ... ]
I'm an independent journalist and researcher based in Oakland, California. I like to look at the major power structures that have shaped the world in my lifetime and explain them to a general audience. My stuff has appeared in The New Republic, Mother Jones, HuffPost, The Correspondent, The Washington Post, Africa is a Country, and many other publications, and it's been cited in The New York Times and TIME. I'm also working on a book about the global fast food industry.
I graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota with a degree in sociology in 2009, and from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 2013.
After grad school, I worked as a writer and fact checker at Mother Jones for a year-and-a-half, where I was one of the few people in the US investigating and writing about a US government effort to increase agricultural investment in Africa-- an endeavor often called the “new green revolution” for Africa, which continues to interest me. My coverage of the 2013 California drought gained a wide audience during a complicated ecological crisis, and was cited in The New York Times op-ed pages. I also wrote about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, breaking news that the Foundation’s endowment had invested in a private prison company. After transferring to our Washington bureau, I covered the 2014 Ebola epidemic and even broke a few stories.
Following my time at MoJo, I worked as a reporter at the multimedia journalism startup Orb Media, where I co-reported a story in three countries on the harmful effects of European immigration policies on families. That story won first place in the multimedia category in the White House Photographers Association’s annual contest, beating the Post and National Geographic.
I was a 2016 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism fellow at UC Berkeley, which supported my research on the poultry industry in Ghana. More recently, I was a Michael Pollan fellow at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, California. I've also spoken about this research before academic audiences at Berkeley, New York University, the University of San Francisco, and the African Studies Association annual meeting.
In addition to my journalism work, I've also worked as an independent researcher, investigating capital flows for a non-profit group representing small farmers in Africa, and conducting historical research for a nationwide anti-smoking campaign, among other jobs and clients.
Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in knowing more about my work.