I am an award-winning freelance math and science journalist. My work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, O Magazine, Discover, Science News, Aeon, Wired, High Country News and many other publications.

My memoir, Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand, was published by Rodale Press in 2017. It describes navigating the science and politics of poorly understood illnesses, based on my experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis. I've also written on the topic for the New York Times, O Magazine, STAT, and others.

Since the book came out, my health has continued to be a complicated story. After another series of exposures — my next-door neighbor's house flooded, and she put the waste material from her remediation in her yard — I got considerably sicker than I ever was during the years the book describes. The mold exposure caused inflammation, and inflammation, it turns out, acts like meat tenderizer. It can destroy ligaments. In my case, the ligaments in my neck gave way, allowing my skull to crush my brainstem. That led me to neurosurgery, and then to further surgeries to manage complications. It's been a hard road. My husband, John, has been beside me through all of it, showing up in ways that have quietly remade my understanding of what another person can be.

Writing, when I can, remains what I most want to do. Right now, that writing lives on my Substack, The Weighing — essays on the clean energy transition in New Mexico, on the experience of severe chronic illness, and on liberal education, subjects that seem separate until they don't.

I started my career writing widely about science and particularly about mathematics, which is still a passion of mine. For seven years, I wrote the Math Trek column for Science News, where I delighted in showing my readers how mathematics could reveal so many different facets of the world. I also wrote the Equation column for Wired, in which I took a single equation and explained how it describes an interesting real-world phenomenon.

Before I became a science writer, I earned a master's in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My time in math shaped my way of thinking profoundly, which I discuss in this interview that Sol Lederman did with me for his wonderful blog Wild about Math!

After my time at MIT, I became a faculty member at St. John's College in Santa Fe — a Great Books school where the curriculum is entirely primary sources and teaching means sitting in seminar arguing about Euclid and Kant and Faulkner alongside your students. During that time, between 1998 and 2001, I built my own strawbale house in a beautiful valley outside of town. I didn't know what I was doing, but neither did anyone else, really — it was the early days of strawbale building, so there was a wonderful community of people online figuring it out together. I have a few pictures of the house up here.

I now live there with John and our Australian cattle dog mix, Roo. John and I often turn to each other and say in wonder, "We live here!"

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