I try to write the kind of stories that recalibrate your gut.
The internet is very good at vibes, but it’s worse at scale, causality, and trend lines. So my beat — whether it’s demography, public health, or even just the small indignities of August — is simple: what’s actually happening, how sure are we, and why does it matter for the way you live and vote and give?
You’ll see a few tendencies in my work. I like big arcs with tight prose. I’m allergic to doomerism but equally skeptical of techno-magic. And I will always brake for a chart that quietly punctures a loud narrative. When millions more kids survive to their fifth birthday than a generation ago, that’s not “good vibes”; it’s one of the most important facts on Earth, full stop. When Americans start drinking less — not because of a moral panic, but because culture, markets, and better evidence shift behavior — that’s worth a clear, wonk-light explainer.
All this is on display in the weekly Vox newsletter I write called Good News: one crisp dispatch about real progress, plus a few other positive stories to light up what can feel like a pretty dark time. It’s not “everything is fine.” It’s “here’s where we’ve made the arc of history bend — and how to keep bending it.” If you want a standing antidote to the doomscroll, that’s where to find me every Saturday morning.
I’ve been all over in my journalism career: six years in Hong Kong and Tokyo as a foreign correspondent for TIME magazine, before returning to New York and covering climate change and energy, with a last couple years as international editor. After I left I wrote a book, End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. That interest in futurism — good and bad — led me to Axios, where I wrote the Future newsletter for nearly two years, and then to Vox, where among other things I edit our Future Perfect section.
When I’m not writing the Good News, I like to tackle the big questions, like just what effect a huge but soon to be shrinking population will have on our planet. I also like the contrarian, everyday stuff, like why our ritualized love for summer doesn’t always match our actual experience, no matter how much we’re convinced it does. And then there’s culture that sneaks up on you: writing about the Australian children’s cartoon Bluey as the father of a now 8-year-old, and why a children’s show about endings hit me — and a lot of parents — right in the future-anxious gut. Different beats, same job: stress-test the vibes, follow the data, and make the world feel legible enough to act.
If you would like to support the kind of work we do at Vox, please consider becoming a Vox member.
