Recent Work

Why drive when you can fly? California’s quirky airpark communities are a dream destination for retirees, but they’re struggling.

I mistook the first nene I ever encountered for a Canada goose, but who can blame me? The bird was leaving a line of droppings in the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge in Kauai, Hawaii.

Libraries aren’t just for books or movies anymore. Increasingly, they’re a place to turn for job skills, shelter — and now, some social services for people who have nowhere else to go.

Each fall, hundreds of thousands of birds descend the California coast on their journey south. One species spends its nights in chimneys, creating a spectacle that draws onlookers from around the state. Julia Scott visits a popular roosting site in the Sonoma County town of Healdsburg.

A group of amateur gardeners share a single, consuming obsession with growing giant pumpkins. They’ll stop at nothing – drain their own bank accounts, experiment with radical products and techniques – to trounce the competition and bring home the top prize: a new world record and eternal pumpkin glory.

Luis Alcala is 11, but he already knows kids his age who are in a gang. And he’s already been offered drugs. That’s reality for kids in Half Moon Bay today, where many young Latinos are sorted into rival gangs by the time they graduate from middle school.

The city of Montreal scrambles to preserve endangered artists in the midst of a real estate boom.

A review of “No Fear: A Whistleblower’s Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA” for Ms. Magazine.

The water supply of more than two million Californians has been exposed to harmful levels of nitrates over the past 15 years – a time marked by lax regulatory efforts to contain the colorless and odorless contaminant. First in a two-part series produced in collaboration with California Watch.

Experts say that nitrate pollution is a major threat to California future water supply, while some cities already spend millions of dollars to treat nitrates in groundwater. Second in a two-part series produced in collaboration with California Watch.