In the summer of 2024, I was hunting a story that I'm still certain exists: a West African immigrant supper club serving up the giant African land snails that periodically escape into the wilds of Miami-Dade. (If you know the details, call me.) But in pursuit of it, I stumbled across the story of another snail -- one that's a core part of Key West's identity despite not having been fished on the island in fifty years. I reported it out for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s podcast Gravy.
This piece took me everywhere from a seaside fishing town in Grand Bahama to a research lab that felt like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for mollusks. (I also survived Hurricane Milton at the heart of the tornado swarm, in an Airbnb cabin with no poured foundation.) Endlessly grateful to everyone featured in this piece, and also hoping to avoid once-in-a-century storms on future reporting trips. Web version here.
A couple of years ago, I started doing cultural figure obituaries for NPR. So far the bulk of my subjects are alive and well, which is wonderful. In telling people’s life stories you fall in love with everyone a little bit, which has left me in my current state of hoping octogenarians will live forever. Those who have already passed on are below.
Bernice Johnson Reagon was a powerful force. As a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she cofounded the a capella group The Freedom Singers (shortly after being expelled from college for getting arrested at a protest!) She also went on to found the women’s a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Bernice was a staunch anti-apartheid activist, and in later life became an incredible archivist of Black American song. She curated for the Smithsonian and produced a 26(!) part documentary on NPR called Wade in the Water that took its title music from this version of the song by The Harmonizing Four. Every time I hear that voice, it gives me chills.
When you make an audio obituary, usually you do it in advance: it could sit on the shelf for a week or for a decade. Bernice passed away in July 2024, but I produced this obituary in November 2023, a month into the Palestinian genocide. I was reeling, and struggling to understand what on earth to do. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s commitment to approaching the long arc of struggle with defiance and joy was an extraordinary thing, and it changed the way I thought about what I could do to build the world I wanted to live in. I’ll be forever grateful to her for that grounding when I needed it.
You can read my full web writeup on her extraordinary life here.
Rachel Pollack is a legend across many disciplines. For example, she created the first trans superhero in the DC Comics universe. (Her name is Coagula, and she has some of the best one liners I've ever read.)
But Rachel is probably most enduringly known as a historian of tarot. Her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom was one of the first to take tarot seriously - not just a parlor trick, but an intuitive, feminist tool for divination and connection.
She was also a pivotal conversation for the Tarot episode of Immaterial that I produced and hosted. She told me a beautiful story about visiting artist Niki de St. Phalle’s Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany. Among the building-size figures of the Major Arcana, she spent a night in The Empress. From her vantage point when she looked outside - tarot was the world.
You can read Rachel's longer obituary here.
Or, as I affectionately refer to this piece: how to be a DIY girlie. I’ve always been both crafty and a homebody, and this piece was a delightful way to chat about both with Cliff Tan of Dear Modern, Amanda Poe from Boho Frisco, and Chyelle Milgrom of FB Marketplace Slut. You can check out the web writeup, which focused more on the feng shui element of decorating, here.
The state of California’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout has led to some messy tradeoffs. In late January 2021, the state pivoted to an age-based distribution strategy. And in so doing, they pivoted away from folks with high-risk disabilities, who say that officials and neighbors have failed them time and again during this pandemic.
After I started following the #HighRiskCA hashtag, I reached out to folks on Twitter to see if anyone who’d been homebound by the virus would want to talk to me. Within an hour two, I’d heard back from Mimi Newman, who’s only been past her front gate three times since March 6th, 2020.
This is my very first reported feature, and I have to say: I’m really proud of it. You can also read the digital writeup here.
This is the first thing I ever made that aired on the radio! In 2015 I was the TA and story doctor for a documentary project in the Mills College intermediate public radio course. (You can tell I had my hands on it because it is chock full of immigrants and feelings.) Called “Waking Up From the American Dream,” the stories told the stories of an Oakland becoming less diverse by the day.
I helped line up speakers, reviewed scripts, and facilitated introductions at Oakland International High School. And I made this piece, about an unaccompanied refugee minor named Nor Kathem. At 20, Kathem found himself at the intersection of the foster care system and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, rapidly running out of time.
“Being a refugee is a surprise,” he said reflectively. “You don't choose it. It's just a must. And there's no words that would describe being a refugee. And there's no feelings [that] would describe it.” You can read the full digital writeup here.