Projection Cooking| January 2019 Cardamom cream cake with candied rose buds. Budae jjigae. Duck prosciutto. On the fantasy of tackling the internet’s most time-consuming recipes.
Floods Nearly Wiped This Iowa Town Off the Map. It May Never Come Back. | Aug. 2019 In Pacific Junction, Iowa, a small town decimated by historic flooding this spring, residents are begging officials to buy them out so they can move on and build anew. But town leaders are resisting, arguing that, if they secure buyouts, they’re allowing FEMA to wipe Pacific Junction “off the face of the Earth.”
––– Philly Inquirer Philly touts its low rate of homelessness, but who isn’t counted tells a larger story | Feb. 2020
Despite years of practice and a growing sophistication in how cities understand homelessness, the data we rely on to understand the scope of homelessness in the U.S. are misleading. What hangs in the balance is the health and survival of all the people who depend on the services that are shaped by these numbers.
––– Pacific Standard The Poison in Our Water | May/June 2018 As scientists sort out the best way to capture and measure the harmful microfibers that now litter most of the world’s freshwater, we have no choice but to keep drinking.
Shrinking Bears Ears | June 2018 No other president in the last 50 years has attempted to shrink the national monuments designated by his predecessors.
Outsider Baseball | June 2017 Jim Johnson led a $4.6 billion budget as under secretary of the Treasury, helmed one of the country’s biggest racial justice centers, and practiced law for one of the most esteemed firms in the U.S. Now he’s running for governor of New Jersey. So why has nobody heard of him?
As the novel coronavirus continued to spread across the D.C. region in early spring, social workers at the district’s child protective services agency began to panic: Their bosses appeared oblivious to the toll this would take on their workforce. Dozens of sick or symptomatic employees, knockoff N95 masks, and COVID-19-positive foster children staying overnight at agency headquarters — in violation of a court order — would be just the beginning for the agency.
Supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Exit Wounds | April 2019 Social workers in D.C. describe an agency where caseloads are often so high, and the pressure to close them so immense, that both children and workers suffer devastating consequences. Unsupported by a weak union and paranoid that they’ll be fired—or “walked out,” in agency parlance—social workers say they’re afraid to flag life-threatening mistakes with supervisors, endangering the lives of the children they’re charged with serving.
Months after the DC Housing Authority went public with details about the extent to which its public housing stock has deteriorated, and years after its residents say they first began to complain, families continue to cope with the physical consequences of living in units that even the Authority’s chief acknowledges are in “deplorable” condition—and they’re doing so with no end in sight.
What Life Is Like –– Still –– In D.C.’s Public Housing |Aug. 2018 One tenant can’t cook on Thanksgiving because sewage bubbles up from her drain. Another saw rats destroy all her belongings. A third breathes in six different kinds of mold. This is the condition of public housing in Washington, D.C.
Documents Show Construction Debacle Jeopardizes Homeless Shelter Replacement Plan | June 2018 Top D.C. officials have known for months that homeless shelters in Wards 7 and 8 are “significantly behind schedule,” largely because the subcontractor responsible for building them had no history doing that work, documents obtained by City Paper show.
