Hi! I’m an editor for Vox’s Future Perfect section, though I’ll soon be transitioning to being a full-time writer, and I couldn’t be more excited to start sharing more of my reporting and writing with you.
We get lots of questions about what Future Perfect even is — I think of it as Vox’s home for big, ideas-driven stories about how the world works, and how we can be rigorous and principled about what really matters most. We think a lot about progress and the future — it’s in our name — and we’re obsessive both about idealistic, utopian visions of what the world could look like and about the most tractable, marginal steps that can be taken to create a more perfect world today.
That’s why I love working here. On the surface, I cover all the subjects that have preoccupied me for many years — including factory farming and the future of food, animal welfare, the ethics and culture of science, urbanism and the housing crisis and why the American built environment looks…like that. But I also try to make everything I write about much more than the surface-level topic or news story — I’m more interested in the ideas behind the stories and what they tell us about the hidden structures that create our world.
I’ve worked in journalism for 11 years, writing about issues from economics to reproductive rights to academic research and the politics of higher education. And although I’ve been obsessed with factory farming — the mass production of more than 10 billion farm animals per year for food in the US, and 70 billion globally — since I was a teenager, it wasn’t until very recently that I made it one of my focus areas. Working at Vox taught me how to write about the ethical, environmental, and human dimensions of animal agriculture in a way that interests and — despite the horror of the topic — even delights everyday readers.
We all eat food, after all, and there’s so much to say about how agriculture, and the meat industry in particular, shapes everything around us. Did you know that, for example, agriculture devours nearly half of Earth’s habitable land, which makes it perhaps the most important driver of humanity’s planetary impact? Or that, although we often write about factory farming as an environmental problem — and it is one! — it is arguably actually the least environmentally destructive way to produce meat? I grappled with that important, somewhat paradoxical, provocative idea in this recent piece, one of my favorites of the year.
Meat connects in important ways to so much else that we think about on a daily basis, from the soybean trade war to the protein craze to ultra-processed foods (I had a spicy take on that one). But I still love to write about what I think is the biggest reason to care about factory farming — the experiences of the animals themselves — like this comic I wrote on the life of a dairy cow.
Increasingly, I’m also thinking about how agriculture, rurality, and the romantic myths we tell ourselves about farming intersect with my other big area of interest: cities, the YIMBY movement, and the great American housing shortage. They have more to do with one another than you might think — consider, for example, how anti-urban the US is, as seen in our housing policies, in the structural overrepresentation of rural areas in American politics, and in the Trump administration’s war on cities. And consider further how America’s shortage of dense housing in the cities and suburbs where people want to live pushes Americans ever-further into the rural periphery, where they may encounter and adopt quasi-rural identities and ways of life. I’ll be thinking deeply about that connection in the coming months and years.
