Featured Projects

The Terminator and the Washing Machine: Unpacking the artificial intelligence panic

For The New York Times / Retro Report

The first time the word “robot” ever appeared in literature in the 1920s, the fictional machines rose up and killed their creators. We’ve been telling the same story ever since. From Hal 9000 to the Terminator, it often seems the measure of a machine’s intelligence is best taken by its wish to do us harm.

It’s a scary vision for some observers, and not just technophobes: Scientists like Stephen Hawking; legacy technologists like Bill Gates; not to mention cutting-edge techies like Elon Musk, have all announced their worries about runaway A.I. killing off the human race.

Remarks like that tend to echo in the press. But how worried should we really be? This web documentary for The New York Times’ Retro Report series offers some answers by talking to scientists working to solve some of A.I.’s toughest problems. And it also does so by taking a closer look at the legendary—and widely misunderstood – match between a supercomputer and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Columbine: Busting myths about the massacre

For The New York Times / Retro Report

On April 20th, 1999, two students at Columbine High School murdered twelve students and a teacher and sent the nation scrambling for answers.

As Dave Cullen detailed in his book, “Columbine,” initial news coverage quickly portrayed the perpetrators as two alienated students, obsessed with carrying out a revenge fantasy against bullies. Those early media profiles have since proved largely false, but they continue to shape the way we understand school shootings today.

Vaccines: An Unhealthy Sckepticism

For The New York Times / Retro Report

This web documentary for The New York Times’ Retro Report series followed an outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland in 2014. The epidemic turned a national spotlight on parents don’t vaccinate their children. My co-producer and I examined how we arrived at a point where the personal beliefs of the few can trump mainstream science.

Power Line Fears: debunking a cancer scare

For The New York Times / Retro Report

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, news outlets reported a disturbing scientific finding: the electromagnetic fields from power lines may cause cancer. In a world that runs on electricity, the threat seemed to be everywhere.

Research suggesting that children were especially vulnerable seemed to offer more cause for fear. The next great public health crisis seemed to be at hand. So what kept a nationwide cancer epidemic from breaking out near power lines, and why are some people still afraid?

Wolves at the Door: Examining if the fight to save wolves put other animals at risk

For The New York Times / Retro Report

This web documentary for The New York Times’ Retro Report series took me to Yellowstone National Park and Montana’s snowy Paradise Valley in search of wolves. Reintroduced to the northern Rockies by the federal government the mid 1990s, the gray wolf touched off a political firestorm that hasn’t really abated since. My piece examines whether all that acrimony may have ultimately weakened the Endangered Species Act.

American Standoff: Ruby Ridge and America’s longest-running police siege.

For The New York Times / Retro Report

When armed suspects stand off against the law today, one event still casts a shadow on both sides of the police line: the siege at Ruby Ridge.

In 1992, federal agents surrounded the remote Idaho cabin of fugitive Randy Weaver, wanted for selling two illegal sawed-off shotguns to an informant. By the time Weaver surrendered 11 days later, his wife, 14-year-old son and a federal agent were dead. The national outcry that followed continues to shape how standoffs are handled across the country even today.

For this The New York Times’ Retro Report documentary, I interviewed a surviving member of the Weaver family and one of the participating FBI sharpshooters to reconstruct the siege. The project also took me to the scene of ongoing standoff Texas, where I conducted my first ever interview with armed, anti-government militants.

On Shaky Ground: The San Francisco earthquake’s unheeded wakeup call

For The New York Times / Retro Report

This web documentary for The New York Times’ Retro Report series examines the legacy of one of the most watched natural disasters in U.S. history. The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake leveled sections of the San Francisco Bay Area and left 63 people dead. Because the earthquake came during a live broadcast of the World Series, it served as a wake-up call for fault zones across the country. We look at how much preparing really happened after the panic died down. But two decades later, our investigation found places facing even bigger earthquake risks than California where dangerously little has been done.

John Liu’s Long Day: Following an underdog on the NYC Mayoral Campaign Trail

For New York Magazine

In this assignment for New York, I received intimate access to the hardest-working candidate in the 2013 mayoral race. As the first Asian-American elected to citywide office, comptroller Liu was intent on making history as mayor. Liu held to a grueling campaign schedule to counter the long odds of his candidacy, and keeping up with him was a tall order.
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Super Secret: Revealing the real original Superman

For Esquire

A story for Esquire about superheroes and rip-off artists. Uncovering the source material for the 1930s Superman comics reveals why 2013’s supposedly fresh and edgy reboot,Man of Steel, probably wasn’t so original after all.
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Wild Horse Wars: Exposing a $40 million animal management boondoggle

For The New York Times / Retro Report

In this web documentary for The New York Times’ Retro Report series, I took an on-the-ground look at the decades-long fight over the fate of America’s wild horses. The production took us from dusty libraries to the snow-swept mountains of Utah. Our piece shows how a decades-old law intended to protect mustangs has given rise to a problem that’s angering animal-lovers and costing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.