Radioactive Memory: What I Didn't Say About Fukushima
“In 2017, I visited Fukushima on a travel grant from Columbia University’s MFA program to research why, six years after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami ravaged the eastern coast of Japan, 35,000 individuals continued to live in temporary housing. The small, prefabricated houses spread across the greater Fukushima Prefecture were quickly deteriorating. Tens of thousands of Japanese were in limbo, news sources insisted.”
Midnight Highway: What I Didn't Say About the Fort Hood Deaths
“One thing to know about me is that I am an enthusiastic but terrible driver; I really only drive on assignment. On the Texas interstate that day in late 2020, heading north, my mind was filled with concerns over the rules of the road. I was filled, too, with a sense of nervous anticipation for what I would find in Killeen, who I might call once I made it there, and what I might learn from them and, if I got lucky, about myself. So I wasn’t paying much attention to the sloping landscape outside the rental car window, the flatlands that became rolling hills, the non-descript chaparral that flanked the lonely highway I was driving on.“
Behind the Briefings: Elaina Plott
“I don't think you should ever rest on the conceit of your subject and their fame in general to get you through a story. You need to convince your readers that they should keep reading beyond the first section, beyond just the fact that this is the wife of a famous senator.”
About Yannis, the Champion of Champignons
“He worked summers along the Riviera as a tour guide, he told me, mostly for ‘rich assholes’ but sometimes for ‘nice Russian women.’ These were the two categories into which he put most of the world’s population and I think it struck him as refreshing, if not downright serendipitous, that I didn’t fit neatly into either one.”
Behind the Briefings: Janet Rodriguez
“I come with a background where I'm not a shocked or as naive about why the president is doing any of this and the impact that it has and how it resonates with his base, and why he presses on the caravan issue for example. It just doesn't surprise me that he's using what's happening at the border for his own political advantage. It works because we've seen it work time and time again in Arizona.”
About the First Time I Met Charles Manson
“He still had an enviable crop of hair and beard, now gray and relatively kempt, and though his skin was doughy and shadow-less his eyes were as soft and expressive as a pig's. As he sat at a visitation table in clean blue chambray, he looked less like America's most dangerous criminal and more like the original Maytag Man, waiting fist-to-cheek.”
About Portobello Road
“I walk down Portobello Road, past the bright blue, red, and yellow facades of buildings that I have no desire to enter, past glossy, small boutiques filled with narrow-hipped women…I’m wearing clean scrubs, clogs. A foreigner. Refugee from a hospital, wanting to preserve my other life, the person I was before the sacrifices of this long training.”