I’m interested in the relationships between selves and the environments in which they’re enmeshed. Sometimes that looks like investigative journalism in environmental justice. Previously, it has meant work in housing and homelessness policy and computational neuroscience. These days, it looks more like research in active inference and political economy.

I am the author of The Weight of Nature (Dutton / Allen Lane, 2024), which traces how climate change alters brain health, cognition, and behavior. With Gregg Colburn, I also wrote Homelessness Is a Housing Problem (UC Press, 2022), which illustrates how housing-market conditions (as opposed to individual failings) explain regional variation in rates of homelessness. My essays and journalism have been published by The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Economist, Aeon, Scientific American, Logic, Sierra Magazine, Geographical, Crosscut, and many others.

I lead the data journalism program at Grist, a nonprofit magazine covering climate change and environmental justice. I also help coordinate the Neuro Climate Working Group, an international research consortium studying the neurological dimensions of climate change. I am a research affiliate of the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and operate a small data science and public policy advisory.