
I’m a senior reporter on the investigations team at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek and previously served as a national breaking news and feature correspondent focusing on politics and policy. My latest features include a reported essay on the life and medically assisted death of my extraordinary father (named a finalist for the 2022 National Magazine Awards); a follow-up story about a legal challenge to California’s aid-in-dying law that raises hard questions about America’s conflicted relationship with euthanasia; a deep look at the company that enabled the working-while-still-breastfeeding mother to be a thing; and a profile of economist Emily Oster. Before that I dove 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. Earlier in my career, I reported my master’s thesis from Timbuktu, Mali, and while an intern at the old BusinessWeek 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.
I moved to Southern California in 2014 after six years in New York City, where I attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and three in France. Born on a blueberry farm in Maine, I was named after the main character in J.D. Salinger’s short story, “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,” which was first published in The New Yorker in 1950 and later became 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.