I am currently working on a book — about death, dying, and the fight to control how life ends — to be published in 2027 by Simon & Schuster. It’s inspired by my reported essay on the life and medically assisted death of my extraordinary father, which was named a finalist for the 2022 National Magazine Awards, and a follow-up that explored America’s conflicted relationship with euthanasia.

I wrote those stories and many, many more during the 14 years I spent at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, as a senior reporter on the investigations team and before that as a national breaking news and feature correspondent focused on politics and policy. My last was a narrative investigation into a company that transformed the plastics industry and what happened when its signature manufacturing process was found to generate the worst of the worst PFAS, aka “forever chemicals.” Others include a deep look at the company that enabled the working-while-still-breastfeeding mother to be a thing, a profile of economist Emily Oster, and investigations into the troubling tactics of solar leasing companies, the deadly pipeline of Chinese fentanyl, Mike Moore’s crusade to solve the opioid epidemic one lawsuit at a time, and how so-called predatory journals are roiling the rarefied world of scientific research with help from Big Pharma.

I covered the 2016 presidential campaign from inside an Iowa caucus and aboard a Greyhound bus for a two-week, 3,041-mile cross-country trip to interview more than 100 voters about their lives and voting plans. I’ve probed the intersection of race and policing while on a graveyard-shift ride-along, revealed the worrisome science behind those creepy robot babies you may have carried through the halls of your high school, and scaled fiberglass walls with Bulgaria’s/the world’s most successful and most foul-mouthed rock climber/theoretical physicist/serial entrepreneur.

An investigation into how the U.S. banking industry provides a conduit for the $10 billion human smuggling industry earned my colleague Michael Smith and me an Excellence in Financial Journalism Award. I’ve been a finalist for the Livingston Awards for my story about the legislative assault on the business of abortion, named the Best New Journalist by the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and received the Feddie Award from the National Press Foundation and the Society of the Silurians’ Excellence in Journalism Award for magazine reporting for a feature on income inequality. I attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, reported my master’s thesis from Timbuktu, Mali, then joined the old BusinessWeek as an intern and broke the story of Goldman Sachs’ access to swine flu vaccine when even pregnant women were empty handed. I was that BusinessWeek employee who raised her hand.

Born on a blueberry farm in Maine, my name comes from J.D. Salinger’s short story, “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,” first published in The New Yorker and later one of Nine Stories. (It begins: “Just recently, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will take place in England on April 18th.” My birthday is April 18th. My parents have claimed they weren’t aware of the coincidence. I am skeptical.)

I live with my husband, two young daughters, and our wire-haired mutt in Santa Barbara, California, and Deer Isle, Maine.