I write about science and technology, with occasional crossovers into design, pop culture, health, and filmmaking topics. I’ve also written about surfing, food, and my own middle name. In addition, I record podcasts from time to time.
I’ve written for Wired, New York magazine, Scientific American, Technology Review, Fast Company, TheAtlantic.com, The Science Channel, Glamour, Salon.com, Green Living, Seed magazine, American Cinematographer, DVICE.com, and io9.com.
And here’s a more detailed list, with links to full articles where possible.
Blockbuster-Quality Effects on a Small-Screen Budget: How “invisible effects” like CGI’d blood spatters and a virtual New Jersey shoreline let the creators of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire build their boardwalk and their empire without breaking the bank.
How Peter Jackson Discovered the director of District 9: Before making his South African alien epic, Neill Blomkamp was internet famous for his innovative short films and commercials.
Ace Quantum Mechanics the Reality TV Way!: A primer matching the properties of subatomic particles to those of trash-TV personalities. (Donald Trump is a gluon.)
The Intergalactic Mashup King : How Werner Herzog turned footage from NASA and arctic explorers into an sci-fi head trip.
The Late Late Show, Live from Inside Halo : An in-game talk show host interviews guests while dodging heavy artillery.
New York magazine
Kickstarter.com: A Collective’s Best Friend: How three interesting creative projects used crowdsourced fundraising to get off the ground.
An Interview with “No Impact Man”: Colin Beavan answers questions about what it was like to live for a year in NYC while attempting to reduce his net environmental impact to zero.
Fall Tech Preview ’09: Highlighting the best and brightest gadgets of 2009.
Technologist – digital cameras: The latest in a series of “technology makeovers,” a professional photographer helps an expectant mother get her camera gear up to speed.
Technologist – mobile devices: A tech entrepreneur advises a touring jazz musician on how to streamline his bagful of mobile gadgets.
Technologist – home entertainment: An A/V engineer makes over an adman’s TV and stereo system.
Technologist – Geek on Demand: The first “tech makeover,” in which an expert tries to solve a fashion worker’s myriad technological difficulties.
Adding Human Intelligence to Software: How a new programming toolkit lets coders “program” workers on Mechanical Turk and create crowd-powered software applications.
What Does ‘P vs. NP’ Mean for the Rest of Us?: How solving an abstruse computer-science problem would (or wouldn’t) affect the daily business of computing.
New Programming Languages, and Why We Need Them: Designers of new languages like Go, Kodu, and AmbientTalk answer that very question.
Today’s Sharks: Smart, Tagged, and in Short Supply: How shark science has changed since Shark Week originally premiered in 1987.
Good Riddance: Human Creations the World Would Be Better Off Without: Why the world doesn’t need Daylight Savings Time, walled gardens in software, human drivers on the road, or the Space Shuttle.
World Changing Ideas – The Power of Garbage [scroll down]: How plasma gasification could turn trash into cheap fuel.
Creating Darwin’s Biopic: A podcast interview segment with Jon Amiel, director of the film “Creation,” and Randall Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson.
Gadgets of the Decade: An annotated slideshow looking back at the most important tech products of the 2000s.
Online Scammers’ Secret Weapon: Comic Sans: How “bad” design may make us likelier to do stupid things online.
The Science Channel
Why It’s Hard to Care About Climate Change: The human brain isn’t designed to take slow-motion catastrophes like global warming seriously. Which is unfortunate.
Rewriting Fearful Memories is Like Updating a Text File on Your Laptop: Pretty much exactly what the headline says, with more details.
Why Sending a Message to Aliens is Easier than Sending a Message to Future Humans: Writing a message to be decoded in the future (like, “don’t dig here, there’s a whole bunch of buried nuclear waste”) is harder than you’d think.
Cleverbot takes a Wikipedia Approach to Simulating AI: An interesting twist on the classic chatbot.
An Interview with the Creator of “Auto-Tune the Cosmos”: A musician turned Carl Sagan’s classic PBS series into a 4-minute techno song, without sacrificing Sagan’s message. Awesome!
How to Defeat This Optical Illusion – Grab It! : Your eye may be fooled, but your motor cortex isn’t.
What No One Tells You About Weight Loss Surgery : The straight dope on bariatric procedures.
Men’s Sexual Disaster Moments : Talking to real men about their “malfunctions” and how to avoid them.
Should I Google My Symptoms? : Pros and cons of self-diagnosis.
Have Any Funny-Looking Moles? : Updates on skin cancer and how to self-check.
Must-Read Cancer News : Smoking is twice as bad for women as it is for men.
The To-Do List of Your Dreams : Seize the day, web 2.0-style, on 43things.com.
The Science (Fiction) of Embodied Cognition: What movies like Avatar and District 9 get right (and wrong) about how bodies shape the human mind.
When the Future Expires: A timeline examining sci-fi “futures” that are now in our real-world past, including classics like 2001, Terminator 2, and IT! The Terror from Beyond Space.
6 Reasons Why You’ll Never Upload Your Mind Into a Computer: Science calls bullsh*t on “the Singularity.”
Real-life Hurt Locker: How Bomb-Proof Suits Work: Pretty much exactly what it says.
4 Reasons Why V’s Giant Motherships Don’t Make Sense: Using science to debunk the sci-fi trope of mile-wide alien saucers that suddenly show up in our airspace. (This one got the nerds pretty riled up.)
Nom de Fume : Imagine you’re in hell and your name is Angus. Wait, that’s redundant.
Interviews with Oscar-winning directors and cinematographers about their craft. Feature coverage including The Aviator, A Scanner Darkly, Flight 93, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill, Die Another Day, and Chicago.
Chris Mooney profile : An interview with the author of “The Republican War on Science.”
Richard Glen Boire profile : A libertarian legal watchdog gets serious about neuroethics.
Endless Summer : Exploring the surprisingly-thriving Midwest surfing scene.
Life of Riley : On the set with Project Greenlight director Pete Jones.
Summer Drinks in Chowtown : Rounding up Chicago’s best thirst quenchers.