audio
Player Piano: A mid-century composer’s obsessive quest to build a songwriting machine.
The Word For Man Is Ishi: Ursula Le Guin’s family history and the science of man.
Parakeet Panic: A 1970s panic over invasive parakeets reveals a history of population control.
Acting Out: The forgotten origins of social network theory, an Austrian megalomaniac, and the missing chapter in Ella Fitzgerald’s life.
This Is Your Captain Speaking: Why do all pilots have the same voice?
The Farming Game: A back-to-the-lander’s farming dream gets crushed by the farm crisis. Then, he invents a boardgame.
Hitler’s Olympics: A series on the 1936 Nazi Olympics, including profiles of a compromised American; a Jewish high-jumper in Germany; and a lie Jesse Owens told his whole life.
Callings: A freelance wiretapper-turned-evangelist uncovers the link between the histories of the telephone & American spirituality.
The Krononauts: How the pandemic bent time & a history of the time travel plot.
Repeat After Me: A 1950s hypnosis craze, postwar psychology, and spiritualism.
It Came From Outer Space (co-written with Jill Lepore): On Michael Crichton & virus conspiracies.
essays
30 Hours With American Christmas, New York’s Go-To Christmas Decorator | The frantic race to decorate NYC before Thanksgiving (Curbed)
Act Your Age | On body-swap films and the history of childhood (Yale Review)
Work Imitates Life | On tech company campuses & company towns. (Aeon)
What War of the Worlds Did | On the legacy of the famous radio play. (Aeon)
The Lore of Big Thief | On the rise of indie-rock darlings Big Thief (NPR)
‘Every man reads one book in his life, and this one is mine‘ | On E.B. White & Thoreau (Salon)
video
Teens on Guns in America | producer (NPR)
Bon Iver Live in Concert | producer (NPR)
Anthony Hamilton’s Journey Home | producer (NPR)
The Stories Behind Alicia Keys’ Hits | producer (NPR)
Tiny Desk Concert: Khruangbin | editor (NPR)
Jorge Drexler Night Owl | series producer & host (NPR)