I’m a magazine writer and essayist with work in Wired, The Guardian, The Baffler, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Vice, Index on Censorship and more. I was previously a reporter in Beijing, where I covered champion oyster shuckers and the mysterious preponderance of misspelled Linkin Park T-shirts. I’m now in Pittsburgh, where I’ve written about the shadowy forces behind viral hedgehogs and the horrors of Duolingo’s Mexican restaurant. 

I write serious things and I write funny things; I also don’t believe those categories are mutually exclusive. My interests include the Chinese internet, Rust Belt nostalgia, local journalism, food writing that reckons with capitalism, animals with weird jobs and following the algorithm to its twisted end.