Unsentimental Education

Mary Ware Dennett’s quest to make contraception—and knowledge about sex—available to all

Originally published March 4, 2021 in The American Scholar

The defendant was a gray-haired grandmother. In the courtroom in downtown Brooklyn, she sat silently as the prosecutor, James E. Wilkinson, read aloud a document she had written—a document that, according to the indictment, was “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy, vile and indecent.

In the face of climate change, some environmentalists are fighting not to close power plants but to save them.

Originally published February 19, 2021 in The New Yorker

In 2004, Heather Hoff was working at a clothing store and living with her husband in San Luis Obispo, a small, laid-back city in the Central Coast region of California. A few years earlier, she had earned a B.S. in materials engineering from the nearby California Polytechnic State University.

How has religious experience changed in a secular age?

Originally published December 28, 2020 in The Nation

Last May, the writer Tara Isabella Burton published a piece in the New York Times Sunday Review about a nascent faith community.

A tour of contemporary fandom

Originally published January 17, 2020 in Times Literary Supplement

Anyone can be a fan, and almost everyone is. Perhaps this low bar to entry explains why fans don’t get much respect: a fan is a follower, a hanger-on, one in a crowd of interchangeable masses.

The climate hazards of air travel

Originally published August 31, 2019 in NYR Daily

In mid-August, to much fanfare, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail from England on the Malizia II, a solar-powered yacht. With a small crew, she embarked on a journey across the Atlantic in order to attend the UN Climate Action summit in New York in September.

Selected Work