Selected work
"Freelancing can feel like tightrope walking without a net... If a freelancer loses work in a tough economy, there is no policy in place to break their fall." Freelance Solidarity Project
Energy & Us is a 300-page interdisciplinary curriculum for high schoolers developed, researched, written, and designed over the course of one year for the Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center. From atoms to the ecosystem to the globe, and from the physics of energy to the history of industry to the science and politics of climate change, Energy & Us examines the intersection of energy, environment, and human society through the prism of Jones Beach, a barrier island and beloved New York state park 20 miles southwest of New York City. The curriculum is available for free public download here.
“There is only the realization of what’s underway, rising up around us like warming water.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Power prefers the dead to disappear; a rush to mourning risks disappearing them on behalf of the powerful. The lives COVID-19 most avidly consumes are the ones already closest to death. It’s no accident that they are also the most spatially set apart: in nursing homes, in factories, in prisons and jails, in segregated neighborhoods and enclaves of precarious immigrant workers.” Guernica, copublished with Urban Omnibus.
“Moral laws derive their power from a sense of natural order. But in moments of crisis, when insolvency has become the norm, the morality and mathematics of debt have proven fungible, susceptible to thoroughgoing change.” Boston Review
“Space in this city is tight, and likely always will be. This city is deeply segregated, and likely will remain so for years to come. But that it is a fact of life does not make segregation a force of nature.” Urban Omnibus
"Down the line, the goal is to get ordinary people thinking of transit failures not only as annoyances but as political problems, and of themselves not only as passengers but as political actors." Urban Omnibus
“Workers report independent unions cutting deals without consulting them, mounting pressure campaigns to get workers to sign substandard contracts, or pocketing dues without advocating for anything or anyone at all. ‘Sounds like organized crime to me,’ Henry says with a bitter laugh.” Urban Omnibus
“There’s actually nothing ’21st-century’ about community policing; something like it has nearly always followed harm to Black men at the hands of police, from unnamed victims in 1960s news reports to Rodney King and Freddie Gray.” Urban Omnibus
“Most importantly, public libraries are where people already go for help they can’t find elsewhere, or when they don’t know where to start. To a librarian, no question is off limits — even, from people returning home from prison: ‘How can I rebuild my life?’”
“Even if armed police are absent from the school building, students feel their presence on the walk to and from school, and in the form of metal detectors and X-rays that they must pass through daily, often to intimidating or humiliating effect.”
“To map “the system” is to demonstrate how its roots permeate the city — and to dispel the myth, once and for all, that its enterprises are marginal or its inadequacies remote.”
“But when the system of incarceration works hard to separate “offenders” from society, maintaining those essential connections means navigating complicated transportation networks, strict rules, and confusing processes that can make being a family member of someone who’s incarcerated almost as traumatic as being incarcerated yourself.” Urban Omnibus