Selected Work

The new feminist armpit hair revolution

Half-statement, half-ornament

Originally published June 24, 2019 in The Guardian

I am usually late to catch on to shifts in the zeitgeist; this one came to my attention just recently. While watching the HBO show High Maintenance, I noticed that Lee, the protagonist’s hip and beautiful love interest, was sporting hairy armpits.

Michael Pollan and Leslie Jamison, sober and intoxicated

Originally published June 5, 2018 in The Nation

In December of 1934, an unemployed stockbroker named Bill Wilson checked himself into Towns Hospital in Manhattan. He had a habit of consuming more than two quarts of whiskey per day, and his wife had implored him to get help.

Jane Jacobs's clear-eyed vision of humanity

Originally published February 3, 2017 in The Nation

In 1956, Jane Jacobs was 39 years old, working as a staff writer at Architectural Forum. Her boss, unable to attend a conference at Harvard, asked her to go in his stead and give a talk on land banking.

Review of The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard

Originally published June 6, 2022 in The Nation

For an epoch defined by mass attention-deficit disorder, Annie Dillard would seem to be the perfect antidote. Dillard, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), is devoted to patience and to presence.

Two Books on the Anthropocene

Originally published November 30, 2015 in Los Angeles Review of Books

THEY WARNED US about this. In California, the future has arrived in the form of desiccated land, 100-degree autumn days, and freakish fires that burned more than 300,000 acres in 2015.