Some of my favorite words

Crepuscular. Schadenfreude. Verisimilitude. Palimpsest. Galactagogue. Erstwhile. Kerfuffle. Defenestration. Umbrellabird (along with other odd bird names, such as Bananaquit and Ovenbird—why yes, I do have a birds page-a-day calendar).

You’re likely to find me reading

Longform journalism. Books and articles about the human brain and the practice and history of medicine. New York magazine. NYT & WaPo. WIRED. Dystopian novels. Nonfiction books about cheery topics like the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918 and a group of hikers who mysteriously disappeared in the Russian Ural Mountains in 1959. (But do I also scroll TikTok too much and binge ridiculous reality shows? Yes.)

Miscellaneous side projects

• In December 2024, I started a newsletter on Substack called The Doomscroller’s Antidote — because we could all use some good news. I send a roundup of positive news stories to subscribers’ inboxes at least twice a week.
• In March 2020, I created a COVID-19 informational website for my community, because I hadn’t seen any local clearinghouse like it. (It also turned out to be a great coping skill.) I updated it regularly for several months. (Yes, my priority was clearly not to make it pretty.) 
• With We Love Rochester (2013-2017), I invited people in my hometown of Rochester, NY, to share what they love about living here. I published posts from more than 100 contributors before I closed up shop.
• Art + cats = this, which started here. (Yeah, I’ll get back to this someday. Possibly.)

My 15 minutes (or rather, few minutes) of fame 

• I’ve had the opportunity to be on local TV news a few times, including during coverage of local protests (but my 14-year-old son pretends not to believe this). In one news segment, one of my cats made an unexpected appearance on camera.
• The abovementioned We Love Rochester blog got some press mentions, and in 2016 it gave me the opportunity to chat about Rochester on local TV with a couple of other bloggers. Related: I was included in The Rochesteriat’s blog post, “You Should be Following these 7 Creatives” [viewable at archive.org], in 2016.
• My name makes an appearance in, of all things, a 2009 amicus brief filed for a Supreme Court case. (The brief was filed by the Humane Society of the United States, where I once worked, and referred to an article I wrote in 2006.)
• A Change.org petition I created in 2015, which asked Apple to remove racist ringtones from the iTunes Store, garnered about 2,300 signatures. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed me for a story — and Apple removed the ringtones soon after (which I choose to believe wasn’t a coincidence, but who knows). I even got mocked on San Diego talk radio. How many people can say that? (Perhaps not surprisingly, eventually the ringtones—or ones like them—eventually returned.)