Select Features
October 2020
Logging in to get kicked out: Inside America’s Virtual Eviction Crisis
In early September, the Centers for Disease Control enacted an eviction moratorium to slow the spread of covid-19. Even with the moratorium in place, however, eviction courts are continuing— butremotely, via videoconferencing and phone dial-in.
In this story, I investigate the phenomenon of virtual evictions and their impacts on tenants’ rights, due process, and ultimately, the eviction crisis in the United States.
Read this and all of my work for Technology Review here, and also listen to my interview about this story on Marketplace Tech.
August 2020
New U.S. Citizens Were One of the Fastest-Growing Voting Blocs. But Not This Year.
In this story supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, I delved into how the pandemic, combined with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ response, is affecting not only naturalization, but also voter registration, with over 315,000 citizen-applicants waiting to complete their naturalization interviews. I report on how this could have profound electoral impacts in November but, regardless of whether it affects the outcome of any specific races, is an issue of voter rights.
july 2020
Inmates witnessed a suicide attempt. They received coloring books instead of counseling.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, incarcerated individuals in California’s 35 state prisons faced poor mental health care. The situation is especially dire for the rapidly increasing number of female prisoners, who make up 4 percent of the state’s incarcerated population but 11 percent of suicides, according to 2016 figures.
In this story for The Washington Post and The Fuller Project, I report on how the pandemic has exacerbated the lack of mental health care at CIW. Inmates have refused tests, temperature checks and other measures meant to contain the virus’s spread to avoid being put in isolation, and four women have attempted suicide while in quarantine or isolation for the coronavirus.
Read more of my coverage of Covid-19 in CA state prisons in STAT.
March 2020
Coronavirus Threatens an Already Strained Maternal Health System
No visitors. Induced labor. Converted delivery wards. Tens of thousands of women across the country are giving birth in unprecedented circumstances.
Even so, the pandemic does not affect all communities equally, and in this feature story for The New York Times and The Fuller Project, I report on how black mothers, in particular, are disproportionately affected by both the pandemics and new hospital policies put into place to fight it.
Read more of my coverage on how coronavirus amplifies inequality in High Country News and Mother Jones.
August 2019
The fight to protect the world’s most trafficked wild commodity
Rosewood is a tropical hardwood prized for its durability, rich color, and fragrant scent, and used to make musical instruments, from guitars and marimbas to violins, as well as high-end, furniture, mainly in China. It is also the world’s most trafficked wild product by value or volume—more than ivory, rhino horn, and pangolin scales combined.
In 2016, Guatemala led the global efforts to add all 300 species of rosewood to Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES.) Three years later, I investigated for National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch the effect that its leadership has had on its internal efforts to stop the trafficking.
leélo en español.
Also see my previous rosewood coverage for south china morning post.
March 2019
ICE and the Banality of Spin
In mid-2018, as news of family separations at the border dominated media coverage and the #AbolishICE movement gathered steam, I decided that, to better understand Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I should go to the source material: ICE press releases.
In this report for Topic Stories, I read and analyzed — using principles of linguistics, data scraping, and data analysis tools — 3,457I CE press releases and wrote about what they taught me about the agency’s worldview.
April 2018
Dreaming of Afghan Mountains
Though Afghanistan is now synonymous with conflict, there was a time when it was known, at least among the world's most elite mountaineers, as a training ground for high altitude ascents in the Himalaya.
In my cover story for award-winning mountaineering magazine The Alpinist, I recount the efforts of local and international climbers to restore to the country a mountain tourism economy and, for a small group of women mountaineers, a sense of agency and freedom in the country's highest peaks.
March 2018
Mexico Is Full of America’s Used Clothes
In my second feature on the San Diego-Tijuana border (see my first here), I explore how a taste for fashion at all price points, inequality driven by NAFTA, and Mexico's maquiladora industry helped create a thriving informal economy of smuggled, secondhand clothing in Mexico.
"We think of borders as clean, finite lines on a map, when in fact they are messy. Borders are the meeting, and often clashing, points of not only distinct geographies but also distinct cultures, values, laws, and even basic definitions. What is clearly one thing on one side can become something else entirely once crossed — and also, temporarily, change in the act of crossing.
Such is the case with used clothes. In the United States, they are discarded goods; once they are in Mexico, they are in-demand commodities. While in transit, they are contraband."
Also available in Spanish.
March 2018
In China, ‘Black Panther’ is a movie about America
One weekend in March, I headed to the cinema to watch Black Panther — in China. As a Chinese-American who has already seen — and fallen in love with — the film, I was anxious and a little curious as to how the movie, so steeped in the African-American experience, would translate to the almost completely racially homogenous country of my birth. I desperately wanted both cultures to show their best sides: that this celebration of black culture in America could be recognized as such and would resonate with Chinese audiences, and that China’s anti-foreign impulses could be overcome.
But what I found was that while in America, Black Panther was a movie about the black experience, in China, it was a movie about America.
December 2017
Can the $86 Million Pineapple Fund Save the Soul of Bitcoin?
On a Wednesday morning in December, bitcoin enthusiasts on Reddit woke up to an intriguing thread in r/bitcoin: a user by the name of @PineappleFund had posted, “I’m donating 5057 BTC to charitable causes! Introducing the Pineapple Fund.” For anyone following the meteoric rise in bitcoin prices, that figure - 5057 BTC - might have the same effect as an extra shot of espresso: it converts to an estimated $86 million.
In this news feature, I interviewed @Pineapple Fund (via Reddit DMs, of course) and some of the fund’s lucky grantees to explore whether this was the start of a shift of bitcoin for social good.
April 2017
How WeChat Spreads Rumors, Reaffirms Bias, and Helped Elect Trump
In the wake of the 2016 elections, when the mainstream American media was focused on how fake news may have influenced voters on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, I noticed that a parallel phenomenon was occurring among Asian-American voters — especially Chinese-Americans — the country’s fastest-growing minority, on the wildly popular but little-understood Chinese social app, WeChat.
I investigated for the long form section of Wired.com:
“WeChat’s design does not make it easy to fight biases or fake news. Information on the platform spreads quickly within and between WeChat groups, but the sources of information — and therefore their verifiability — are de-emphasized, to the extent that sources are almost completely ignored. As a result, credibility defaults to whomever shared the information last, and whether he or she can be believed. The litmus test for truthfulness has moved from, “is this argument supported by evidence?” to, “is this argument shared by someone whose judgment I trust?”