Writings
Discover the Fresh and Surprising Flavors of Slovenia, A Secret Delight, The Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 2024
Dealing With the Book Critics as an Author, Writer's Digest, 2024
New book ‘Slippery Beast’ looks into the lucrative business surrounding baby eels, LAist, Listen
People ask me why I wrote a book about eels. I tell a series of lies about it, Boston Globe, 2024
Slippery, Slimy and Sublime: On Our Fascination with Eels, Literary Hub, 2024
The French chef Adrien Ferrand grew up with eels, which he caught with his father while on summer visits to his grandparents’ home in Burgundy. His grandmother prepared them, but not to her grandson’s liking. “They were no good,” he told me.
Carl Elliot, in 'The Occasional Human Sacrifice,' champions the whistleblowers of academic medicine, Boston Globe, 2024
My father, a pediatrician, was no one to gossip about his colleagues. So I was surprised when he shared the story of twin brother gynecologists who he'd known from their medical school days. The twins, he said, were "junkies" yet managed to maintain flourishing practices. I asked my father why he didn't blow the whistle on the pair, and he looked askance. To do so, he said, "would be disloyal" to the profession.
As an adult, a daughter reconsiders the circumstances of her father's murder in Tracy King's 'Learning to Think', Boston Globe, 2024
“Memory is not frozen, it’s very much alive, it moves, it changes.” So said the great French film director and screenwriter
Louis Malle. Indeed, memory is a moveable feast on which we selectively graze. And in the case of memoir, authors tend to select the choicest morsels, avoiding the mundane, the boring, and the genuinely humiliating. Yet one assumes a memoir to be — if not an exact rendering — at least an honest stab at the truth.
Innovative Fish Farms Aim to Feed the Planet, Save Jobs and Clean Up an Industry’s Dirty Reputation, Scientific American, 2022
Carter Newell owns and operates one of the most productive mussel farms in the state of Maine. One frigid spring morning I joined him and his two-person crew on a short boat ride to the barge he calls Mumbles, a 60-by-24-foot vessel anchored that day in a quiet cove in the brackish Damariscotta River. Named for the Welsh seaside town where Newell once did research, Mumbles was tethered to a steel-framed raft hung with hundreds of 45-foot ropes, each thick with thousands of mussels in various stages of development.
The Legend of the Music Tree, Smithsonian Magazine, 2022
Not long ago, while browsing a craft fair in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, I spotted a guitar like no other I’d ever seen. It hung half-hidden behind a display of cutting boards and wooden bowls in the booth of woodworker and luthier David Smith. Noting my hungry stare, Smith gently lifted the instrument from its perch and urged me to give it a try. I cradled it under my elbow and plucked a few chords. The sound was resonant and true. But the most remarkable part was the look of the thing: Its back and sides rippled like a full moon reflecting off a dead calm sea. Mesmerizing.
Act now, wait for perfect evidence later, says ‘high priestess' of U.K. COVID-19 masking campaign, Science, 2020
In May, when several prominent U.K. scientists pushed back against a Royal Society report recommending face masks to help control the spread of COVID-19, Trisha Greenhalgh was furious. The scientists argued there was insufficient support in the scientific literature for the efficacy of masks, and the U.K. government, following their lead, declined to mandate masks for the general public.
An Urgent Time for a Year Off Campus, The Atlantic, 2020
American higher education has coped with major international emergencies before. During World War II, students left in droves to enlist—and then returned, after the war, eager to resume their formal schooling. (In 1947, nearly half of all admitted college students were veterans.) The United States is now suffering through another crisis of enormous magnitude. Congress has already passed $2 trillion in relief and is considering more. And yet colleges and universities from coast to coast appear bent on muddling through—that is, either by reopening their campus despite the dangers or by patching together enough online offerings to put on a facsimile of a fall semester.
College May Not Be Worth It Anymore, New York Times, 2018
Last year, New York became the first state to offer all but its wealthiest residents tuition-free access to its public community colleges and four-year institutions. Though this Excelsior Scholarship didn't make college completely free, it highlights the power of the pro-college movement in the United States.
