There were rarely simple answers. Sometimes, another interview or two was needed to confirm small details of a complicated timeline. For other questions, we needed to make very careful (and rigorously debated) changes to language to capture a scientific nuance. Tsunami wave height isn’t the same as runup, for example. Scientific estimates of future landslide size and volume can be fraught. We had to do and check a lot of math and balance simplicity and directness with scientific accuracy.

I’m sharing all this first because I don’t know if non-journalists always realize the amount of time and effort that goes into a story like this one — you don’t just write the thing and call it a day. There isn’t a word in this piece that wasn’t checked by multiple people over weeks.

Here’s one example:

To avoid leaving you in suspense, I was just talking about the plant’s color.

And to be completely clear, I’m not complaining about this process in any way. Not only can it be kind of fun, depending on the fact checker (this time it was!), I feel so much better about the piece knowing we’ve crossed every T and dotted every I, fact-wise — once it’s printed, there’s no changing things.

I’ve been through fact checking for features before (and I’ve written about the process in depth in this newsletter) but I knew this was going to be on another scale from anything I’d done before. And so I thought I’d try an experiment — AI.

Now, I am something of an AI hater, for many reasons (environmental, labor, algorithmic bias, disinformation, intellectual property concerns, etc.). No matter how many times my email client or web browser tries to force a new LLM feature down my throat, I refuse to use it — no, not even to write emails. I certainly don’t want to read AI-generated emails — why would I force anyone else to do so?

But AI/machine learning/LLMs can be useful tools in specific circumstances. Machine listening is revolutionizing bird migration research, for example (I wrote about that for MIT Technology Review a while back). For years I’ve used otter.ai to transcribe interviews — long before the company started heavily marketing its AI features. In grad school, we messed around with some of the free tools Google offers for journalists. One of the newer ones is Google Pinpoint. It’s a research tool that lets you upload a bunch of documents in different formats (PDFs with handwriting, spreadsheets, videos, etc.) and makes them searchable/sortable/filterable. It can transcribe audio, extract data into spreadsheets, etc. Here’s an example of a public database from the Los Angeles Times for a story about soil contamination after the LA fires.

In preparation to hand the story over for fact checking, I had already organized 147 documents in a Google Drive folder — interview transcripts, research papers, PDFs of email exchanges, photos, maps, research articles, community meeting minutes. And I annotated the story draft with 132 comments linking to those documents with interview timecodes and explanations for the research editor to go through.

That annotation step took me a very long time (as it always does with fact checking). But I think it was sped up significantly by my experiment: I imported those files from Google Drive into Google Pinpoint. From there, I used the built-in Gemini search box to ask questions about the documents when I couldn’t remember exactly where a specific fact in the text came from. For example, take Hig estimating the risk of a landslide collapse at Portage Lake at 1-in-30 in a given year. Gemini returns a paragraph-style response based solely on the documents I’ve uploaded to the folder. Footnotes link directly to specific documents, with specific passages highlighted within them.

I’m not saying it’s foolproof, but this isn’t a Google AI overview of a search result that could be pulling information from random Russian misinformation websites — all the LLM has to work with is what you upload to the Pinpoint folder. Sometimes the associations/summaries it comes up with are a little off, but I know the material and am not trusting it to — or to do any writing. I’m just using it as a search tool to find specific facts in a sea of documents. I also wouldn’t trust it with any particularly sensitive information/documents — like any cloud service.

But there you have it — I think Pinpoint is worth experimenting with if you have a lot of data or many documents/interviews you need to search through for insights. It doesn’t replace the actual journalistic work of thinking through the story and writing, but it does help speed up the tedium of fact checking. I’d probably use it again on another project of this scale.

Here’s a link to the piece online. Please subscribe if you're able — that helps convince the higher ups to continue commissioning stories like this one. Today, I wanted to share the backstory — how the piece came about. It was the result a lot of re-reporting work, luck and not giving up.

I first met Bretwood Higman — Hig, as everyone in Alaska calls him — back in 2023 on a reporting trip for Undark Magazine. I’d followed a team of state scientists to the village of Seldovia, accessible only by boat and plane, for a tsunami inundation mapping exercise. Hig, a Seldovia native, is also an independent, Ph.D.-trained geologist. He specializes in reconstructing tsunamis based on the rocks they leave behind when receding, which follow a clear pattern in grain size (the largest boulders aren’t transported as far as the smallest pebbles).

Hig took our team on a field trip to Grewingk Glacier, which he grew up hiking to, a short distance from town. Starting a mile or so out from the glacier and lake it terminates into, we found ourselves surrounded by car-sized boulders. Hig explained that in 1967, an unstable slope left behind by the retreating glacier suddenly collapsed into the lake, sending a 200-foot wave rushing all the way down into the sea beyond. This phenomenon, where retreating glaciers result in giant bedrock landslides that can generate tsunamis, is called debutressing. The same thing could happen again, Hig said, munching nonchalantly on a bagel, at any minute. The glacier had retreated a lot more since 1967. And lidar showed the slope was slowly creeping along, maybe toward a second collapse.

All this was sort of a side show to the main focus of my story, inundation mapping for traditional, seismically generated tsunamis — and how you convince communities they’re at risk when they haven’t experienced that particular disaster before. At the community meeting (to which he wasn’t exactly invited), Hig asked difficult questions, slowing down the process. Afterward, there were mutterings about this guy among the state scientists — apparently Hig inserting himself into these issues was a known phenomenon. Some state and federal officials I talked to told me not to talk to him for the story. That perked my ears up.

Even if I’d wanted to heed the warning, Hig talked to me. Hig talks a lot — even when you’re bushwacking up a near-vertical cliff and desperately out of breath. At a NOAA research lab near Seldovia later that day we met, he cracked open his MacBook — all these external hard drives of maps haphazardly Velcroed to the lid — and like a detective with a peg board and red yard, started laying out this theory for hours, late into the night. Grewingk was not an isolated case, he said — other giant landslides had collapsed in recent years in Alaska, at a rate that might mean this was a new emerging geohazard, unprecedented in the history of human settlement in the state. There were also hints from these slides that landslide science doctrine — for example that slow movement inevitably leads to collapse eventually — wasn’t quite right.

Sitting next to Hig on that NOAA lab couch, I filed it all away. I didn’t exactly trust this guy — not affiliated with any university of government research group, dressed somewhat haphazardly in dirty backpacking clothes, smelling like he’d been outside quite a long time. But if what he was telling me was true, this sounded like a story. I did some more research and learned Hig had sounded the alarm back in 2020 about a landslide called Barry Arm in Alaska. The state had taken seriously — the USGS now monitors the slope for imminent collapse. But, I learned from others, Hig had burned some serious bridges by taking the news to the media, so local communities and federal and state agencies learned of the hazard from a New York Times story. And the USGS was not expanding their response to the scale of the hazard, which is much more widespread than just Barry Arm.

I stayed in touch with Hig and the more I talked to him, the more I started to trust him. State officials seemed to be both jealous of his independence and freedom from bureaucracy and endlessly annoyed by the problems he caused them by pushing relentlessly for more research and hazard mitigation and by going right to communities and telling them they were at risk (an adjustment, in his view, from his Barry Arm misstep) — blindsiding the agencies. But he was clearly whip smart and well respected by landslide scientists around the world. And he had started designing his own instruments to install on landslides, a sort of grassroots warning system to fill the government gap.

I knew from that point I wanted to write a feature. I pitched versions of the idea for two years — to The New Yorker, High Country News, The Atlantic, WNYC’s Radiolab, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, The Guardian. My early pitches, from 2023, are pretty bad. They mostly focus on Whittier, the town at risk from a Barry Arm landslide collapse. No one was interested — it wasn’t clear to editors how this story would build on that 2020 New York Times news piece pointing out this new hazard. I overcompensated and the story ended up too sprawling and complex — in some pitches I mentioned Norway, which is also facing giant landslides, and Chile.

With some editors I exchanged more than a dozen emails, answering questions and reformulating the idea. As I talked to editors, my pitches started to focus on Hig more and more — this one sort of renegade, vigilante scientist taking on this hazard singlehandedly. I started to get the same feedback from editors (I’m quoting one here): “There is a lot about this story that I love, but I’m having a hard time seeing it as a feature for us…I’m sure there’s another publication that will hoover it up!”

In 2024 I wrote a short piece for the late Hakai magazine about a small part of the overall story — the risk landslide-generated tsunamis could post to cruise ships. They didn’t want to do a whole feature. Hig is a central voice in that story. But I was still left wanting to write more — to do the “big” story on this topic.

Then, I met Erika Hayasaki (a narrative journalist with an excellent Substack whom I really admire). I mentioned this story that I really believed in and had been trying to find a home for. This was last February. She jumped on a call and talked through the idea with me. She gravitated towards details I hadn’t emphasized before, like this Bible camp in Glacier View, Alaska facing the very biblical threat of utter destruction from a landslide. And she told me to write the opening of the pitch as a scene-setting narrative lede, and to emphasize the tension, the place and character, the themes of religion and community conflict beyond the science.

I decided to try pitching the story one more time before giving up. I’d met a National Geographic editor at the National Association of Science Writers conference in Raleigh, North Carolina the previous fall who’d introduced me to Brian Resnick, the magazine’s relatively new Editorial Manager. He’d read my feature on cold-water corals in Hakai and from that, I think trusted that I could write longform, narrative features (one story can really open doors!). When I tried my revised pitch on him, he just got it. He had lots of follow-up questions (the initial email chain is 57 emails long!), but as we tweaked it together, it just kept moving through the gates at National Geographic until it got to the Editor in Chief, the final yes/no vote on feature stories in the magazine.

The story had a lot of angles that worked for Nat Geo — a serious, dramatic, almost epic (especially visually) hazard that no one’s paying attention to, one guy (who also happens to be a famous adventurer/trekker) taking it into his own hands, a science mystery. And the timing was good on multiple levels. It was early 2025, as government science funding and staffing collapsed. To Brian, Hig’s quest raised deep, important questions — who, in this chaotic moment, with government ceding ground, gets to be an expert? Who do people trust, when it comes to climate change and geohazards? Could locally rooted experience be the key to that trust, in a place like Alaska? Is Hig a model for a post-government future of science? Can this one guy fill that huge gap?

The fact that the story ended up in the print magazine was somewhat down to luck — there was a gap in the magazine’s feature well a year out. But I’d finally found an outlet that matched the story’s themes and ambitions.

Here’s the pitch that ultimately landed the story at National Geographic:

HED: The man scrambling to stop Alaska from falling into the sea

DEK: Inside the race to chart Alaska’s growing landslide hazard – before it’s too late.

I met Bretwood “Hig” Higman for the first time on the shores of Grewingk Lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Ahead of us, across the water and past floating icebergs, loomed a massive glacier; below it, unstable rocky cliffs left behind by its retreat. Some 50 years ago, a landslide collapsed into the lake below the glacier, sending a 300-foot wave roaring over this beach, transporting the car-sized boulders we’d hiked past for hours on our way here. It could happen again at any moment. Hig calculated the risk in his head as he chomped a bagel—our day hike to Grewingk was OK, but he wouldn’t camp on this beach overnight, he told me.

The Arctic is warming four times as quickly as the rest of the world. As its glaciers recede and its permafrost thaws, the steep slopes left behind are increasingly collapsing into valleys, lakes and fjords, sometimes causing colossal waves, hundreds of meters high (like the one that made news worldwide in Greenland recently).

And more landslides are coming. Scientists in Alaska are monitoring cliffs above a fjord in Prince William Sound, which could collapse with enough force to generate a tsunami several hundred feet high, devastating coastal communities in its path. There are thousands of active, creeping landslides across the state, waiting to collapse—and researchers find more every year. Alaska has already suffered tens of millions of dollars of damage in recent years—and the future implications for insurance rates, property values and the booming cruise tourism industry are staggering.

Scientists don’t yet understand what sets off these so-called “deep-seated” landslides, which have complicated internal dynamics compared to the mudslides and debris flows that occur in the lower 48 after heavy rain events. Cutting-edge research seems to show they work similarly to fault lines, which slip before failing periodically. Millions of cubic meters of rock can move slowly for years before failing catastrophically, or never fail at all.

In the absence of a government mandate, scientists like Hig are scrambling to identify and inventory them using new remote sensing techniques. The Alaska Earthquake Center just invented an innovative new method to detect landslide failures (and, amazingly, measure their volume) using existing seismographs, but they still aren’t ready for what’s to come. Cataloguing, assessing risk level and monitoring every unstable slope, as Norway has done, isn’t possible in Alaska, where landslide volume and movement rates are orders of magnitude higher, communities are remote and independent, funding is limited and the environment is harsher.

Without a unified government effort, Hig is taking matters into his own hands. Now, he’s working in individual communities—installing instruments of his own design on residents’ properties, learning how to protect them from inquisitive grizzlies, hungry goats and harsh weather conditions. In the tiny community of Glacier View, he’s working with a Bible camp to install cheap sensors on a landslide that, if it collapsed, would wipe out the camp, dam the Matanuska River and destroy Alaska’s only internet line.

He’s gained a lot of followers. But Hig’s unorthodox methods have also led him into conflicts with government agencies. He often takes research findings straight to the media, to the chagrin of government scientists who’d rather he vet findings in academic papers first. He’s also divided some communities—residents in Glacier View have proposed a measure that would ban talking publicly about landslide research, out of concern about property values and insurance rates. When Hig works there, one man often flies a small plane over him to keep tabs on what he’s doing.

The next four years will likely see deep cuts to federal government staffing and funding support for natural hazard research, right when we really need to better understand the growing threat landslides pose to high-latitude communities worldwide. But Alaska’s far-flung, diverse communities are used to being left alone to figure things out. And they don’t always have a lot of respect for outside government expertise anyway. In this moment, the community-driven landslide monitoring effort Hig’s building up across “The Last Frontier” state might be a model well beyond its borders.

I’d like to report a feature about the growing threat of deep-seated landslides in the Arctic following Hig’s efforts to understand and monitor them before it’s too late. We’re entering a world where the climate has changed such that the very ground beneath our feet is shifting—from mudslides in Southern California to rock avalanches in Chile. How can people in Alaska come together to stay safe? And can one guy bring an entire state around to seeing the world and thinking about risk the way he does?

Thanks for reading this newsletter and (I hope!) the story. Feel free to share the piece with friends/help me get the word out. As always, happy to chat about it — leave a comment or shoot me a message! I’ll be sharing much more from this reporting project (including a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the piece) in future editions of this newsletter.

First, here’s a free gift link to the story:

A Landslide in Alaska Set Off a Tsunami. There May Be More to Come.

Scientists say as glaciers retreat in a warming climate, landslide-generated tsunamis are likely to become more frequent.

I’ve been sitting on this story for a while. Last July, I was up in Alaska reporting on an emerging, climate-linked geohazard — deep-seated, bedrock landslides that can generate megatsunamins when they collapse into water (fjords or lakes) — for National Geographic. These events are increasing in frequency as glaciers retreat, leaving steep fjord walls unsupported. That story is coming out next week in the June issue of the magazine, which I am VERY excited about.

Anyway, just after I got home, one of these things actually went off in the Tracy Arm fjord in southeast Alaska — a mountainside mass of rock equivalent to the volume of 24 Great Pyramids of Giza fell into the deep waters of the fjord in about a second, sending a wave splashing 1,578 feet up the opposite fjord wall. The wave scoured the fjord clean of trees and soil, leaving behind bare rock. The before and after images are just stunning. What struck me the most was how close a call this was — it was just lucky timing that there weren’t any cruise ships visiting the fjord during the disaster.

I knew I wanted to write about Tracy Arm — this was a really big deal within a field I’d been embedded in for a couple of years at that point. There was a barrage of media coverage in the immediate aftermath — including featuring the kayakers on an island some 50 miles away from the landslide who had their gear swept away by the tsunami as they slept. But I was working on a magazine story on this topic that wouldn’t come out for another nine or ten months. I talked with my editor, Brian Resnick, about doing a newsier web story about Tracy Arm, but it didn’t work out. He’d actually joked during my fieldwork that it would be great for the story (but dangerous, of course) if one of these landslides happened while I was in the field. I just missed it!

So when I heard from my sources that the landslide science community would be working on a study about the event, targeting one of the biggest journals out there, Science, I put a note in my calendar to follow up. After many months of emails back and forth, the study finally had a publication date. I pitched the NYT’s then-science editor Michael Roston, who was tentatively interested but swamped with Artemis II coverage. When I followed up again, luckily, he was still interested in a story. And so I had an assignment well before the paper hit EurekAlert and probably caught the attention of many more media outlets (which lead author Dan Shugar has collected here).

So today, I wanted to share a couple of tidbits that didn’t make it into the final cut. First, I love opening stories with scene-setting quotes — it’s the narrative writer in me. And I really liked this one from Hig, one of the scientists who did the initial survey of the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. Just a month or so after the wave, he was pack-rafting through thick ice (the disintegrated remains of the glacier) and uprooted tree trunks floating in the fjord, then scrambling some 500 feet up the near-vertical cliffs, looking for tiny signs of the maximum tsunami run-up like bent-over blades of grass and leaf veins left behind on trees, the rest of the leaf tissue shredded by the current.

“It doesn’t really make sense to my head to be standing way the heck up on a mountain and being like, the water that’s down there right now somehow made its way up here.”

Alas, in news, word count is everything and scene-setting quotes aren’t critical to the story!

The other bit I couldn’t fit into the story is a little more complicated. But basically, Hig and other researchers have this big nagging question — it’s been a year, so why wasn’t this tsunami a wake-up call? Why did it fly under the radar?

It might come as a surprise, but the U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Tsunami Warning Center had no idea the landslide tsunami had happened until later — they found out from the survivors, including that group of kayakers. No one was killed, but there was no warning and, by all accounts, it was a very, very close call.

For years, landslide researchers have pushed for a monitoring system for this emerging geologic hazard in the style of the Alaska Volcano Observatory — a warning center staffed 24/7 that uses in-situ instrumentation to monitor for eruptions and send warnings via the National Weather Service.

The origin story for AVO looks very much like Tracy Arm. In 1989, KLM Flight 867, en route from Amsterdam to Tokyo, was forced to make an emergency landing in Anchorage after losing all four engines to volcanic ash from Alaska’s Mount Redoubt. It was a close call — enough to motivate USGS to begin monitoring volcanoes for eruptions, which they weren’t doing before.

Landslide scientists hoped the Tracy Arm tsunami would similarly push USGS to create a landslide observatory, but there’s been no such action taken. Again, currently, no federal or state agency monitors or warns for these giant landslides. And funding to these agencies is actively being cut.

Bretwood Higman, one of the Alaska-based scientists pushing hardest for action, has a theory why. For one thing, volcanoes have a long cultural head start. Kids learn about Pompeii in school. Those that live near volcanoes watch them steam and sometimes glow — a warning sign that danger is imminent. Humans have feared volcanoes since long before volcanology existed.

Landslides don’t have that same embedded story. The signs of imminent collapse are often invisible, even to scientists. And these are an emerging hazard — not unprecedented in Earth’s geologic history, by any means, but certainly unprecedented in recorded human history. The science of understanding how and why they collapse is similarly in its infancy. But now, Hig and others argue, is the time to act — before there’s a mass casualty event that does inevitably break through and spark a response.

The crew had been interviewed for promotional videos and the like, but we were doing deep dive one-on-one conversations in the privacy of a sound booth (without a crowd of public affairs officers and producers looking on) and roundtable conversations where the astronauts could react to each other — frequently with laughter. We knew this crew was special. They’re smart, humble, funny, just all-around likable. But we didn’t expect them to become household names.

We were worried that this mission, despite years of preparation within NASA comms, wouldn’t break through to the broader public. When we first started publishing our podcast series, ahead of the earliest launch attempt in January, it didn’t land to much fanfare. Artemis II wasn’t making the news at all, outside of the dedicated space and science websites and publications. Then there was a war in the news. But the rocket launched, the livestreams switched on — on NASA’s YouTube channel, but also on a lot of the streaming sites. And people started watching. Millions of people.

I think I realized it was going to be big when my sister started sending me TikTok fan edits of Koch and hype videos of the rocket launching. Early on in the mission, Wiseman’s “I have two versions of Microsoft Outlook and neither of them are working,” complaint to Mission Control became an instant meme.

And the human moments kept coming — Glover’s “I love ya babe,” to his wife from the Moon. Wiseman pointing to his daughter’s friendship bracelet on his wrist (Mission Control: “Copy heart, copy bracelet.”), the dedication of Carroll Crater to Wiseman’s late wife, followed by a group hug and tears in space. I started seeing fanart of all kinds — paintings, glazed pottery, hand-drawn animations, original songs, crossovers with Project Hail Mary of all kinds (an incredibly well-timed movie release — amaze, amaze, amaze!). People fell in love with Rise, the Moon Mascot/zero-gravity indicator plushie (which, I’m happy to report, is now available for purchase), and with Wiseman as its adopted “father” — especially when he broke protocol and “rescued” rise from the capsule after splashdown.

I joined the social media site Threads amid the mission (you can follow me here if you’re so inclined) and found it delightful. It was full of people experiencing what quickly became known as “Moon joy” (inspired by Jacki Mahaffey’s instantly iconic “Copy, Moon joy” in Mission Control, in response to astronauts raving about what they could see on the lunar surface during their flyby). Watching Mission Control and the crew communicate — with respect, politeness, competence and intelligence, experiencing awe and joy and love for one another while doing something very hard — was a breath of fresh air, I kept seeing people post. They felt some hope for humanity in a dark time. And not only did The New York Times cite our podcast series repeatedly, I also saw so many organic mentions on Threads suggesting people listen to the series to get their fix of more Artemis II content. People asked questions and got answers. They were engaged. They wanted to watch and learn more.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything NASA-related break through in this way. The Artemis II crew were parodied on SNL mid mission. People started referring to Artemis II as “their show.” Some had the stream on 24/7, even coming to love that dull hum in the background when no one was talking. They saw the crew as their friends — in this era of longform live streams and reality TV parasocial relationships, people were perhaps primed to. I saw people referring to the crew as their “emotional support astronauts.” "Millennials experiencing a positive unprecedented event for once" went one social post.

By the time of splashdown, sports stadiums had the livestream up on their jumbotrons. The stream was up in sports bars. Pretty much all the streaming platforms had taken on the stream — afraid to be left out of the action. So many people were posting about pursuing careers at NASA.

After the mission was over, I saw people posting about how to keep the Moon joy alive — it was like summer camp had ended (as a NASA colleague joked), and people were loathe to go home and back to their normal lives (and social media feeds). It really seemed like, for the first time, a fandom had formed around NASA — the kind of people who get obsessed with a TV show. People were buying NASA merch and starting to watch the sorts of routine (but very cool, in my opinion) things NASA streams live, like cargo resupplies to the International Space Station and spacewalks. They were getting excited about the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (launching as early as this September!).

Artemis II just feels like such a fantastic success for this agency and its story (and its storytellers). After the Space Shuttle program ended, a lot of people lost interest in NASA. Occasionally I’d talk to a family member, friend or acquaintance who didn’t realize NASA was still around, or was part of the government (and subject to the whims of those in power). Private companies like SpaceX have dominated the news in recent years, and public interest in space has seemed to decline in lockstep. Billionaires going to space for their own ends isn’t something everyone can get excited about. But a public agency doing it for all humanity? That, maybe, people can get excited about.

When I got home from Kennedy, my elderly neighbor came up to me in the front yard. He’d watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing live on TV as a kid. He’d had big dreams for the future of space travel — space stations at Lagrange points, robotic explorers on the outer planets. None of that had materialized, and he’d sort of lost interest and faith NASA could do anything that excited him again over the years. Well, he was excited now. He told me he’d already called our representatives in Congress to urge them to fully fund NASA.

A week ago today, four astronauts climbed aboard the Orion spacecraft, more than 300 feet above the ground atop the mighty SLS rocket, and blasted off into space. I was down in Cape Canaveral at Kennedy Space Center for the launch, working as a TV “live shots” producer for NASA and collecting interviews and tape for the agency’s Curious Universe podcast—more reflections to come about what that was like and how we’ve worked to share the story for sure. But today, just past the halfway point in the crew’s 10-day mission around the Moon, I thought I’d write a quick dispatch about something that’s stood out to me (and surprised me) about Artemis II—the role of audio in telling the story.

If you’ve been tuning in for the 24/7 live broadcast on YouTube or watching key milestones live on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime or Peacock, you’ve probably noticed that the picture isn’t great a lot of the time. We get occasional peeks inside the capsule, but most of the time it’s a relatively low-res view of the spacecraft and the Moon or Earth as seen from a camera on one of the solar array arms. That’s because Artemis Mission Control in Houston has limited bandwidth to work with—although they’re recording in 4k, they aren’t transmitting that on the live broadcast. The priority is always critical comms, science data, etc. Eventually we’ll get high resolution imagery from this mission, but not immediately.

The result is an audience of millions largely experiencing this mission through audio. We’re seeing the Moon and Earth through the astronauts’ eyes, but specifically through their descriptions, aloud to Mission Control, of what they’re seeing in real time. And those descriptions? They’re phenomenal. It’s easy to picture what the astronauts are seeing through their words, which often also carry a lot of emotion. The old cliché is that radio is a visual medium—theatre of the mind and all that. These four Artemis II astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen have just proven why that cliché is true.

Here’s Victor talking about the terminator, the dividing line between the illuminated and dark sides of the Moon:

VICTOR GLOVER: There are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness, which indicates some real variation in terrain … Up to the north, there is a very nice double crater. It looks like a snowman sitting there.

VICTOR GLOVER: Boy, I am loving the terminator … There's just so much magic in the terminator — the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes. You'd fall straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those. It's just so visually captivating."

Kelsey Young, the Artemis II science lead in Mission Control, radioed back:

KELSEY YOUNG: Oh my gosh, that was an amazing picture you just painted. I glanced over at the SER (Science Evaluation Room) video and I literally saw fist pumps in the air. Those types of observations are things that humans are uniquely able to contribute.

Our audio team has been following along with the broadcast and pulling audio in real time, which the social team has been using to make audiogram videos like this one of Victor’s message to Earth before Loss of Signal (LOS), when Orion passed behind the Moon and (as planned) temporarily lost communication with Mission Control. There’s no video, but the audio carries the story.

We hear a lot about the importance of video, especially short form video, in the media industry. But here’s a broadcast that’s been live since April 1 with pretty low-res video, at best, and we’re hearing from partners like HBO, Netflix and Peacock that people are loving it. Maybe that’s no surprise—people would be captivated by humanity’s return to the Moon after more than 50 years no matter the medium. And young viewers especially have been primed for long livestreams by parasocial relationships with Twitch creators and the like. But I think there’s something about the pure simplicity of the audio medium.

You may have also heard this lovely exchange, between astronaut Jeremy Hansen and Mission Control:

JEREMY HANSEN: A number of years ago we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one. There’s a feature in a really neat place on the Moon, and it is on the near side, far side boundary. In fact it’s just on the near side of that boundary, and so at certain times of the Moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth. And so we lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko and it’s just to the northwest of that at the same latitude as Ohm, so it’s a bright spot on the Moon. And we would like to call it Carroll. And you spell that C-A-R-R-O-L-L.

MISSION CONTROL: Integrity and Carroll crater. Loud and clear. Thank you.

Clips of that moment have gone viral on social media and even spawned fan art. But for those looking to go deeper beyond those big moments in the broadcast, we’ve seen our longform podcasts play a key role. People Googling Carroll Crater may have come across this piece in The New York Times (by the fantastic science reporter Katrina Miller). You’ll see that piece cites a Reid Wiseman quote first heard on Curious Universe. A handful of other stories in that paper recently have cited our podcast episodes to provide context on moments from the mission.

We’re actually doing something different this week and producing a podcast with a day or so turnaround (it should be out now on the Curious Universe podcast feed!) catching listeners up on the mission, from launch to lunar flyby. But typically, we spend months or even years on our episodes and series, with the goal of producing evergreen stories—the ones the news has been citing. I think this proves there’s an appetite for that. We’ve been getting great feedback from our listeners, and folks I met at Kennedy told me they’d listened to the show for research—including an astronaut and a BBC space reporter.

One last thought… I often see the question “why send astronauts to space?” What can humans accomplish flying around the Moon that a robotic spacecraft couldn’t? It’s a fair question, and I agree with the sentiment in principle. We cover a lot of robot-driven science on the podcast—the Perseverance Mars rover, the Europa Clipper spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. We get a lot of great science from those missions without any risk to human life.

But man, that question feels a lot less sensible after you’ve seen a group of astronauts, floating in their spacecraft, their voices breaking as they name a crater Carroll. Or after you’ve heard them describe lunar canyons or the colors of the Moon with excitement, or tell you they love you. If you want to get someone to connect with space and space science, it’s the human element that makes that happen, the human story. Of course it is—as with any science story.

Amaze, amaze, amaze!

Happy Wednesday! I’m about to board a flight to Orlando for the April 1 launch attempt of Artemis II from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I’ll be there all this week helping with live shots—setting up interviews with media outlets for live interviews with NASA scientists about the mission.

I am (this is an understatement) VERY excited to watch this rocket fly, and these four astronauts, whom our audio team has gotten to know over the last couple of years, have their big moment and fly around the Moon—something no one has done for over 50 years.

My recording kit is packed, and I’ll be collecting tape and interviews onsite with the people behind the mission on the ground at KSC all week. We’ll be producing some short podcast episodes about the mission’s big milestones—the launch, the lunar flyby, the splashdown in the Pacific Ocean 10 days later. I’m especially excited to hear what the astronauts say as they look down at the Moon, and maybe see parts of its surface that have never been studied by human eyes. I can guarantee it’s stuff you won’t hear anywhere else!

Those episodes will drop in the Curious Universe podcast feed, on NASA.gov and wherever you listen. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we produced a 5-part series on Artemis II there, featuring several years of our reporting on the mission from across the country.

I’ll plan to share more here later about what it was like to cover this historic launch. In the meantime, any questions about Artemis II? Or for/about the people who’re making it possible? Let me know!

Will you be watching the launch? (on plus.nasa.gov and most streaming platforms)?

In the deep sea, things move slowly. Take a deep-sea coral, growing in total darkness in freezing cold water, thousands of meters below the surface. One such coral, a species of the Leiopathes genus found off the Hawaiian coast, is the oldest known continuously living marine organism at Earth at 4,265 years old. I learned this while reporting a feature on cold-water corals for Hakai magazine back in 2024, and it’s stuck with me. Just stop and think about that for a second, coral scientist Michelle Taylor told me:

“It blows my mind. This one little planula (a swimming coral larva), this tiny little zygote, landed when there were people in Egypt considering making pyramids, right? And then through all of the human time that's happened since then, it's just been getting a little bit bigger, getting another polyp, a little branch. When did it start breeding? As soon as it had two polyps? There's so much that I would love to know. I will probably not find out even a tiny portion of this my lifetime.

So much about these animals remains a mystery. There are a lot of reasons for that. For one thing, it’s logistically difficult and expensive to get samples from the deep sea—you need big ships, submersibles and other technology, and you’re operating in narrow time and weather windows. All this is very expensive. At best, you end up with a handful of samples spread out geographically and across time. And corals live on such different timescales than we do, answering even basic questions about them is nearly impossible (even with perfect samples). When you’re looking at coral genetics for cohort effects, as Taylor does, to see how individual animals are related to each other, you’re looking across hundreds of generations at once. A 4,000-year-old individual may have spawned and created babies every year for that period.

DNA sequencing technology has come a long way—Taylor’s just now able to analyze the samples she collected for her PhD way back in 2008—but we’re still only beginning to understand the genetic connectivity of the deep sea. Most population genetics studies, she told me, end up just discovering what was thought to be one species is actually two. That kind of thing can “blow up a project’s timeline.”

Say you want to study something like how a thousand-plus-year-old coral actually reproduces in the deep sea—how far its larvae travel (maybe to find out if deep-sea ecosystem restoration is possible after you destroy vast swaths of the seabed with oil exploration or deep-sea mining, as another coral scientist, Erik Cordes, does). That requires being very patient. And there’s another somewhat impossible problem—funding. As Rhian Waller, the coral scientist I ultimately traveled to Chile to profile for that Hakai story, said early on in our conversations, “One of my bugbears is that cold-water coral research doesn’t fit in a 3-year funding time scale, which is the traditional churn of things.” That’s long been a problem in science—with researchers spending more and more of their time seeking funding and limiting their questions to the short periods they can get money to study. What’s three years to a thousand-year-old coral?

When Cordes, the coral restoration scientist, sinks coral polyps to the seabed to see if they’ll survive and breed in the wreckage left by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Florida coast, he knows he won’t have definitive results for 10 or 20 years, or maybe even a century in deeper water. That’s definitely beyond that 3-year funding timeframe. There’s no guarantee he or other scientists will be able to return regularly to check on the corals they hope to study—especially with the future of federal science funding increasingly in question.

Then there’s Waller’s work in Chile. It took her 10 years to secure the funding she needed to do a baseline study of reproduction in a rare species of coral in the fjords of Chilean Patagonia. For corals that live centuries, that’s no time at all. For a researcher, it’s a good chunk of your career. And there was another variable in the mix—climate change. When she finally got her lab spun up in Chile for a 3-year project, she planned to fly down in late July from her home in Sweden to collect coral sperm and eggs when the corals spawned in Chile. A decade earlier, she’d collected and dissected corals from that fjord and to determine the exact week they’d spawn. In reality, they spawned a full two weeks ahead of schedule. She found herself on the phone, trying to explain procedures to her local collaborators. The climate (and thus the water in the fjord) had warmed enough over those 10 years that the corals’ reproductive cycle had accelerated. It now isn’t possible to get a pre-change baseline measurement of “normal” conditions in the fjord. In other words, in this case, science is out of sync with reality in both directions—how fast the climate is changing and how slowly corals grow (and how quickly they could adapt). After that first year, she was left with only two more coral spawning seasons to get it right.

How do you get the funding to do research that won’t come to fruition for decades? There are some funding mechanisms for longer timescales, like the NSF’s Science and Technology Center program. I covered one STC, called COLDEX, a few years back. Its goal is to find and drill a core of Antarctica’s oldest ice—to extend the ice core record back to a time when Earth was last as warm as it will soon be again. Every part of that effort is slow—finding a needle-in-the-haystack spot to drill, drilling and extracting ice, getting it back to the U.S., painstakingly analyzing the core sections. And there are long-running field research stations like the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center—I covered a 35+ year project there studying how methane emissions from wetlands are changing in a warming climate. But those sorts of opportunities for long-term research are few and far between—and likely fewer and further between with ongoing massive cuts to U.S. science funding.

I’ve always been drawn to these kinds of projects and the people who pursue them. But as a journalist, it can be hard to sell a story about this kind of thing to a magazine. A bit part of the science media industry is focussed on quick-turn stories about new scientific papers and big discoveries. A 35-year project tends to be old news. But I worry that it’s in part because people don’t hear enough about these kinds of projects that the public thinks they’re a waste of money, or are OK with pushes to cancel them. We don’t hear how many decades of constant, government and university-funded data collection props up the weather forecasts that appear on cell phones, for example.

And of course, science funding is largely controlled by governments (read: politicians). For a coral restoration project with a 50-year payoff (especially one that most people will never see, due to it being a few thousand meters below the sea), “resource managers and even more so politicians don’t have that kind of patience,” Cordes said. “They don’t ever really think on those timescales.” It’s also why (bear with me as I introduce more examples) we haven’t gotten back to the Moon in 50 years. NASA’s Artemis program is the only such initiative to survive a presidential transition since Apollo. NASA had sunk billions into the Constellation program’s mission architecture (ordered under the Bush administration) before Obama cancelled it. The things journalists and critics point out as flaws in the Artemis program—the complicated rocket with parts dating back to the Space Shuttle era—are the only way it’s avoided cancellation so far. The program has so many states involved, it has continued congressional support. That complexity slows things down, but it’s kept the Moon mission alive. It’s the same for other big space missions like the James Webb Space telescope—which many engineers and scientists worked on for their entire careers before they finally launched and began returning data.

So we’ve got the timescales the natural world works at, that science works at, that politicians work at. And then there’s also industry/commercial companies. All four intersect in another issue I’ve been covering recently—deep-sea mining. In this case you have companies on one hand that want to start mining ASAP—maybe even this year. They’ve designed and tested the equipment; they know how to mine the seabed for minerals. They say we need those minerals to power the renewable energy transition. The conditions under which seabed mining is profitable exist within a narrow timeframe and depend on external political and economic factors. On the other hand, you have politicians from dozens of countries who’re making very slow progress on international regulations to set the boundaries on mining. And part of why it’s going so slowly is the science isn’t there yet. We aren’t even close to knowing what all lives on the seabed in the areas targeted for mining, much less what the effects of that mining on sea life could be. It’ll take, as with Cordes’ coral research, decades to learn if life can recover from the impacts of mining. Politicians and companies both lack that kind of patience. The results we do have, based on early small-scale mining tests in the ‘70s, seem to indicate that it cannot.

The kind of mining I’m talking about here is nodule mining—dredging the abyssal plain for polymetallic nodules, these potato-sized lumps of minerals that have precipiated out of the water in the deep over millennia. Matthias Haeckel, who’s studied the impacts of deep-sea mining for his entire career, modeled the long-term impacts before he had any actual data and concluded that essentially, plowing the seabed for nodules means destroying it on the scale of a human lifetime or longer. Initial tests in the last couple of years gave him the data to check his models and prove them right—like Taylor, who waited years to have the technology to analyze the data she’d collected (except the reverse).

Another deep-sea researcher, Lisa Levin, told me, “People don't realize how different it is from the scale of mining on land and it's an intergenerational impact, right? It's not like you're gonna do it this generation, everything goes back to normal by the next.” What you’re actually destroying when you plow up the seabed is a thin crust of sediment home to microbes that play a role in carbon cycling, and many species of worms, crustaceans and other sea life. That sediment builds up incredibly slowly, over millions of years. We can destroy it in minutes.

There’s also another type of mining worth touching on briefly—grinding up the metal-rich crusts that grow around the hydrothermal vents at mid-ocean ridges. Yet another collision of timescales here—the UN agrees we should only consider mining “inactive” vents. The active ones are known to host unique forms of life that rely on the conditions around those vents. Setting aside the fact that we only don’t know if there’s similar life on inactive vents because we’ve used limited research funding and time to study mainly the active ones, scientists know these vents can toggle between active and active (on a spectrum) on timeframes we don’t understand. Just because one seems inactive when we look doesn’t mean it won’t reactivate in a year, or a decade, or a century. Trying to understand that phenomenon on a 3-year research grant cycle is pretty much impossible too.

The important question here—are we OK with a few companies getting rich destroying large swaths of the seabed for centuries, so we can get more electric cars and batteries over the next few years?

If you’ve read all the way to the end of this I have to apologize—I don’t have answers. But I’ve been thinking a lot about this and wanted to pull on some threads from stories I’ve been working on—themes that usually end up getting cut out of the stories by the time they’re published. And I think these timescales are something we should think more about as journalists when covering science. Science is an imperfect system, and it’s worth being honest with readers, as much as we can, about its flaws.

On a warm day last May, I found myself stumbling through dense undergrowth in rural eastern Iowa, near my hometown. My headphone and microphone cords tangled in brush honeysuckle and multiflora rose as I followed a decisive path cut by Erin Irish, a biology professor at the University of Iowa, and Gene Szymkowiak, her husband, just ahead. Then we broke through into a clearing. From the hilltop, you could see for miles. The ground all around us was blackened by a prescribed burn the duo had conducted recently. Small bones and the white shells of cooked snails crunched underfoot. Little green tufts were already breaking through, reaching for the sky.

For the past 20 years, Irish and Szymkowiak have spent much of their free time on this property, sandwiched between degraded forested pasture land, trying to coax it back to an earlier state—oak savanna. The place where tallgrass prairie and woodland meet

I’d first spoken with Irish in March of last year, just after I’d gotten the assignment to write an essay about prairie remnants on pioneer cemeteries in Iowa for Noema Magazine. I’d gotten the idea for the story from another scientist at the University of Iowa, Silvia Secchi, when I interviewed her that January for an op-ed about carbon sequestration pipelines for ethanol plants in Illinois. At one point in the interview, she pulled out a book called Life and Death on the Prairie by Stephen Longmire, a New York-based landscape photographer, to illustrate a point—prairie used to cover most of the Midwest, and now it’s so rare it only persists in the few places that haven’t ever been plowed, like pioneer cemeteries. I found the book (it’s no longer in print but the University of Iowa has copies) and knew I had to visit the magical place at its center, Rochester Cemetery—a unique oak savanna remnant just 20 minutes or so from my hometown. That led to the Noema essay, and to Irish.

In the book, Longmire mentions Diana Horton, a University of Iowa professor who spent her career documenting Rochester Cemetery’s rare prairie plants. But she’d passed away, years before. I cold emailed Irish in the biology department to see if she knew much about Rochester, and it turns out she did—she used the cemetery as a model for this restoration she was attempting just a couple of miles down the road. So after I visited Rochester for a garlic mustard pull earlier that day in May, I drove down to meet Irish and Szymkowiak at their property. By that point, I was also working on a feature for bioGraphic Magazine about herbicide drift—this ongoing ecological crisis in the Midwest where chemicals sprayed on crop fields are drifting onto native ecosystems, killing even the strongest trees. It turned out drift from nearby farms was also decimating the oaks in their restored oak savanna.

So, it turned out Irish was at the center of two stories I was working on. And that ended up being a challenge—I wasn’t sure which story to use her in. She was a little outside the scope, geographically, of the bioGraphic story—it was focused on Illinois. And while the Noema story did get into prairie restoration, I already had a bunch of other sources on that topic (there were 20+ people I interviewed at length for the piece, in the end). And it didn’t make sense to introduce a whole new location/write a new scene to include her restoration.

So, Irish ended up not making the cut in either story, which was a shame because I really like her as a character. She’s complicated, like all the most interesting people are. On the one hand, she cares deeply about prairies and about ecological restoration. She’s spent so many hours and weekends and so much of her own money on the backbreaking work of seeding, conducting burns, etc. to conjure prairie from degraded land. But on the other, she makes her living, as most biologists do at the big land grant universities here in the Midwest, making industrial agriculture more efficient.

She studies corn—the very plant (invasive in Iowa, technically, although we don’t use that word because we’ve decided we want it here) that’s supplanted and destroyed native prairie across the state. It’s the reason for the century of large-scale plowing that’s left a fraction of a percent of Iowa’s native prairie extent alive, that’s polluting Iowa’s waterways, resulting in highest-in-the-nation cancer rates. And on top of that, it’s the plant that demands the herbicide application for weed control that’s now also destroying Irish’s restored prairie through drift damage. To me, it’s almost like she’s paying penance for this career spent on corn, making amends with the land for the damage industrial farming has done. Laura Jackson, the Tallgrass Prairie Center director at the University of Northern Iowa, told me that’s not uncommon—a lot of the farmers and landowners who reach out to her to try out conservation practices do so out of a sense of guilt—understanding the environmental damage farming has wrought (like fish kills down the Mississippi in the Gulf).

Maybe that internal conflict is enough of a story to stand on its own? If you want me to write it (or produce it for radio), let me know, lol. But for now, I thought I’d share my original interview with Erin, in Q&A form. I started by asking her about the late Diana Horton.

ERIN IRISH: Diana Horton was actually a person who studied mosses, but she was, in general, very passionate about preserving the natural environment. And Rochester Cemetery was close by. It’s like, less than a half hour drive from campus, right? And it was a place that’s been maintained by trustees of the cemetery for a long time, and they mow it, but the township around Rochester is very tiny, so there’s not huge amounts of resources to be pouring into that. You could think of it as benign neglect. So Diana had had with various students, gone through and made a list of everything that was out there, and so that that was a really nice resource.

Now, the reason that I am interested in this is that, although my research is on plant development, I am also very concerned about the environment and more than maybe 24 years ago, my husband and I purchased an old pasture that is oak savanna, and we’ve been in the process of restoring it. So the oaks were there, but everything else was pasture. You know, forage, non-native introduced plants, and it turns out that that the land we bought is about four miles south of Rochester Cemetery, so a good place to go and sort of see what it’s supposed to look like, and figure out if we have anything out there that’s native. It’s just been a wonderful shining star of what we’re trying to emulate, because it Rochester is also a savanna with these marvelous open grown oaks with their sort of mushroom shaped canopies that tell you that the oak grew up in full sun and not in a part of a woodland. So the cemetery existed as a source of inspiration.

Iowa is blessed with probably the best soil on Earth, so there’s hardly a square inch that wasn’t converted to row crop production. And so, the places that escaped that that move into productivity would be railroad right of ways and cemeteries, where the native plants that were there have a chance to survive.

CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: I would actually love to hear a bit about your research background, which is plant development, right?

IRISH: I’m in this uncomfortable space in that my research organism is corn. Which there’s way too much of in this state. I guess there are other people I know who work on an organism that is an invasive species and they would prefer that it not be so successful. Corn is only invasive in terms of the infrastructure that has developed over the last century of making corn be so easy and profitable to grow that anybody with the need and interest to do agriculture as their home economy, it’s like, that’s your go-to plant. So that’s why we see so much of it. I wish there was a little bit less.

ELLIOTT: I’m so interested in that, because I’ve spoken to other researchers, and a lot of people work on corn and the land grant universities obviously have been phenomenal at understanding corn, helping us grow corn. But I understand it is kind of in direct conflict with prairie, right? And the existence of prairie?

IRISH: Yes. So, my current research topic is to understand how the plant makes the transition from juvenile to adult. So, the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth, when the plant’s making leaves, and then it starts making flowers. That’s a really easily observed and intensively studied process, but in order to make that transition to flowering, plants have to mature to what we call an adult state, and that transition is, in most species, more or less invisible. But corn is a plant where you can definitely tell the difference between a juvenile plant and adult plant, because the juvenile leaves are smaller, they’ve got a waxy surface, they look kind of blue green, and then as an adult, they quit making that wax, and so they’re bright green, and there’s hairs all over the leaves, which are also way, way bigger. So having that ability to just look at a leaf and conclude it’s still a juvenile. So it makes it good for doing experiments.

ELLIOTT: Obviously you’re a plant scientist, you like plants…

IRISH: [Laughs]

ELLIOTT: Were you always interested in prairies? Was there a moment you got interested in them?

IRISH: I can remember in college and when I was taking a course on plant identification, and the professor would say, “Oh, and this, this plant is a native,” and I’d be sort of shrugging my shoulders, like, who cares whether or not native. I grew up in Ohio where, yes, there’s agriculture. And Lake Erie is still plenty polluted from runoff from agricultural fields, although they’re way smaller than they are in Iowa. But when you come here, it’s like, “Oh my gosh.” Like, just over spring break, I drove back home to see my mom and I was just struck by how you go down the highway and you can be going through a woodland, and now I’ve, I guess, become so much of an Iowan that it’s like, “People are walking away from money that they could earn by chopping those trees down and growing corn from it.” I’m glad they didn’t, but, but it’s just striking how modified our landscape is. So it was moving here and realizing there’s something like, half of public land is just road right of ways.

ELLIOTT: Yeah, I’ve heard that stat.

IRISH: Like, parks? No, we don’t do parks. We’re gonna grow corn. And so, realizing what an ecological disaster the state is. When we moved here more than 30 years ago, I wanted a house with a big yard, because I’m plant biologist, I wanted to have a nice garden. We wound up buying a house close to campus with a pretty small yard. And so, there was this unmet need to grow stuff. So I was always looking to buy land somewhere, but didn’t really have a clear idea of what we were going to do with it besides, it was going to have plants on it, which is kind of unavoidable, unless you really want to do a parking lot. But it wasn’t until we actually got the opportunity. And then it was like, “OK, well, what are we going to do with it? Are we going to build on it or what?” And then at that point, I also had been a member of the advisory board for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The way that worked was that there were two representatives from the three regents’ universities in Iowa, and then someone from the Farm Bureau and some Practical Farmers of Iowa, and there were some soil conservation district members. So, I started to see agriculture more from the inside than I ever did before. And then it was like, “Oh my gosh, I have an opportunity.” It seems like restoring this to something of what it was like before European settlement changed it so dramatically would be a good project.

ELLIOTT: What’s that involved? I assume a lot of work.

IRISH: Well, yeah, a lot of work. I had to learn what the plants were that are native. And so visiting Rochester Cemetery was great, because you could see what it looked like. You have field guides and there are pictures and drawings, and they are nothing like having the real thing in front of you. And then, sort of driving around level B roads, those ones that are not maintained, so, after a lot of rain, those are pretty dangerous to drive down, because you can get stuck, but looking for a little remnants where there might be some native plants, where you can collect a handful of seeds and take them home, and then figure out where they’re supposed to grow, and then do something to get them going, which for ours, we have 40 acres. We don’t have a tractor, I don’t want a tractor, I don’t want to maintain it, I don’t want to know anything about it. So our general strategy, now that we sort of have things under control, and almost all of it is converted to 95% native plants, that has been accomplished by doing burns, mostly in the spring. We do a third of it every year, so we’re on a three-year rotation. Spring burns will help us get the non-native plants that are not so adapted to a fire regime to not do so well, and that gives the natives that are adapted a chance to get a foothold. And we’ve gone and have collected some seeds from here and there, trying to stay within our part of the state, so that whoever we collect is already pre-adapted to the environment we’re going to put them in.

But just taking cattle off of it, and, you know, sort of dealing with that, the first flush of, oh my god, the weeds that came up when there were no longer cattle chomping on them was, it was astonishing. But we’re kind of past that, that horror state. And now, there are things like orchids and lilies that show up. And we did not put those seeds there. To this day, it remains a puzzle. Where did they come from? And someone would say, “Well, they probably came from a seed from nearby.” There is no seed nearby. Even though Rochester Cemetery is not that many miles away from us. It’s on the other side of the Cedar River, and it is east of us. So the chance of a lily seed making it from the cemetery to our land is, you know, there’s no way that that explains that we’re still finding them just popping up all over the place. And these are fancy. This is not day lilies, not ditch weeds. These are real Lilium species that are showing up. They’ve been there all along. How they have stayed alive in the face of 100 years of grazing and, you know, not ever gotten big enough. I mean, I feel like I have literally crawled on my hands and knees over 90% of that land pulling weeds one or another species over time. So I kind of know where everybody is. And during that time, I never saw a clump of leaves there where I’d say, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s a lily.” It’s like, no, there’s no sign of it. And there it is in its brilliant glory.

ELLIOTT: I remember reading some stuff by Stephen Packard, who did all the prairie restorations in the Chicago area, and he had this idea of, like, the land remembers what it is like to be prairie. Like, if you, if you burn it and do the right things, all the seed bank in it can come back up.

IRISH: Yeah, it’s pretty impressive.

ELLIOTT: You sort of said this already, but how long have you been working on the prairie again?

IRISH: We bought it in 2002. So more than 20 years. We’ve been working on it since the first day we bought it, working hard on it. There’s no set of directions you can refer to, so we did a lot of stuff that they gave us zero results. So, I would say we have had 20 years of successful practices. And I’m not saying that nobody has ever done this before, but a lot of reconstruction and restorations are being done, if it’s on a large scale. It was a former agricultural plot, and the people who are doing that often have access to things like tractors. The idea that, you sow the seeds and then you mow three or four times during the first summer to keep the weeds that would have come up around it down. Well, I don’t have that. So we tried a weed whacker, you know that thing with the little string. And so if you’re thinking about a scale of more than an acre, it’s like, no.

ELLIOTT: I wanted to ask you too about oak savanna, because, as I understand it, that’s even more, I guess even a rarer, to some extent, ecosystem.

IRISH: So, if you think about a woodland like you find in Ohio and a grassland, at the point where they come together, it’s sort of an interdigitated thing. The difference between woodland and grassland is basically number of inches of precipitation per year, and the slightly drier environment is more favorable for fires, and so the fires tend to keep the trees down in prairies, whereas it’s just wet enough that you don’t have the big forest fires that would convert an Eastern hardwood forest into a grassland. The biome of eastern hardwood forest grades into the tallgrass prairie of the Upper Midwest, and it’s because of precipitation. And so it’s at that point where you’re going from wet enough for trees to too dry for trees. At that boundary is where savanna develops, where there are tree species that are fire tolerant, and they are mostly fire tolerant because they have really thick bark as adults. As seedlings, if a fire goes past your oak tree, and it’s only this big [she gestures with fingers] it’s gonna get burned down to the ground, but the roots survive, unless you’ve had a catastrophic fire. And then eventually, it’s a long enough time happens between successive fires that that it’s now big enough that when a fire goes through it survives.

In our savanna, we have giant old oaks, but they are so old that because of herbicide drift and probably other environmental assaults, they are one by one dying. We knew that they were big old trees and that were not going to last forever. We had no idea how many more years they would be alive, relative to how long we’re going to be alive. So, one of the first things we were doing was looking for new oaks that would come in and start to grow to ultimately fill in for where the big ones were eventually going to perish. And so, when we do our spring burns, we rake like crazy, make 12-foot circles around them. Basically rip off all of the grass that was dried up and dead and therefore burnable around them.

ELLIOTT: You brought up herbicide drift, and it’s interesting, I’m working on a different story about that, more focused on Illinois. But it sounds like that’s a big issue that I’m hearing is like, we want to keep these oak savannas, but the oaks are not doing so well. So, it sounds like that’s also happening in Iowa.

IRISH: Since I’m plant biologist, this is actually something where I feel like I can speak with more authority. There’s this phenomenon called tatters, where oak leaves, they’ll come out in the spring, and they look like they’ve been chewed by insects all the way down to all the veins. So there’s just like the skeleton of the leaf is left. And for a long time, people thought, oh, you know, bad bug infestation. And it wouldn’t happen every year, but it’s definitely associated with a combination of two different kinds of herbicides, auxin-based one so things like 2-4,d, and then another one, Metolachlor.

ELLIOTT: I was talking to the Prairie Rivers Network, a nonprofit out of Champaign. But they’re mainly looking at Dicamba.

IRISH: Yes, that one’s really bad. So Dicamba because it’s so volatile, the legal practice of application of herbicide is that you have to be mindful of wind speed, and so under 10 miles per hour, it’s okay to spray. And the idea is that you apply it, and then the mist settles to the ground, and then the particles adhere to the plants, and it does its job. But Dicamba is really, really volatile, so you can spray it doesn’t just stay where it is. It will re-volatilize and then go in an uncontrolled fashion to lots of things. We’ve had Dicamba completely destroy a vegetable garden, completely wiped out, but it also affects oak trees. But Metolachlor and 2-4,d, this is still somewhat up for debate, but those herbicides have the effect of interfering with the biosynthesis of the long-chain fatty acids that are the precursors to the wax that’s on the surface of oak leaves. And so, it’s this window of time when the leaves are expanding and are maybe a centimeter along, when they are cranking out those waxes that are going to wind up protecting the surface. And so, when that herbicide hits at that point, it would have the effect of preventing the formation of that protective wax cover. And that would explain why the leaves look like they’ve just been eaten up by insects. They basically have fried out because they don’t have the waxes that keep the water in the leaf.

ELLIOTT: So this is that’s not something they have to test before they’re when they’re developing an herbicide?

IRISH: The testing is basically to make the product attractive to the purchaser. It is not so much thinking about the neighbor of the purchaser. So that there can be collateral damage is usually not a super concern.

ELLIOTT: I’m so glad I talked to you, because it seems like you can help me with both of these stories.

It turns out, of course, that she did. Returning to the tape of this interview, and an hour and a half of recording from my visit to her property, Irish was invaluable in helping me think through these two stories. She just didn’t end up quoted in either of them. Sometimes, that’s how it goes!

I’ve been interested in so-called “localized” geoengineering interventions in the Arctic and Antarctica for a while now. Back in 2023, I wrote for Sierra about a project that aimed to raise the albedo of sea ice—reflecting more sunlight back into space to reduce melting—in the Arctic, but ran into (predictable) issues by not properly including Indigenous communities in their research. After a decade of attempts, the project shut down last year.

But over the past three years, the research landscape feels like it’s shifted in a big way.

For one thing, there’s the war in Ukraine. Decarbonization in Europe has been on the back burner for years now—all discussions seem to center on “energy security.” Countries are balancing climate goals with funding their militaries. For another, the second Trump administration has seen unprecedented cuts to science funding and a surge of interest in fossil fuel development. The U.N. now predicts we’ll blow past the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 C within the decade. Given those developments, geoengineering seems, to both scientists and governments (notably the U.K.’s, which has dedicated more than 50 million pounds to research), a more enticing prospect than it did just a few years ago. More researchers are now willing to attach their names to initial projects investigating the feasibility of interventions—it no longer feels like career suicide to do so. And most significantly, major, mainstream foundations are funding the work, joining the usual suspects—Silicon Valley billionaire types.

Last September, I saw Gloria Dickie’s piece for Mongabay about a proposal to construct a 50-mile curtain attached to the seabed near Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica to prevent warm ocean currents from flowing under the ice shelf, melting it from below. In the upcoming field season December-February (austral summer), real field research was planned on the ground to collect data that would inform the curtain’s design. It seemed like the perfect news peg to investigate those ideas about a trend in geoengineering’s acceptance that I’d been thinking about for a while. The same month a group of researchers published a major article tearing the proposal (and a handful of others) apart. I pitched The Atlantic’s science editor (whom I’ve pitched many times before, unsuccessfully!), and after some emails back and forth and a phone call, I got the assignment.

The research team aboard the RV Araon icebreaker was surprisingly easy to stay in touch with. Via Starlink internet (a total gamechanger for Antarctica), I Zoomed with David Holland from the bow of the ship—he’d flip the phone camera around so I could see the sea ice. Beyond calls with the team, I was able to follow just about every development on the research cruise via The New York Times’ coverage. Science reporter Raymond Zhong has been aboard posting daily updates. Miles O’Brien is also on the ship, reporting for PBS. So that aspect of the reporting was easy. The rest was not.

Polar geoengineering is a complicated issue and quite a contentious one. I wanted to be fair to both sides. I talked to a lot of scientists involved with various projects, independent of them, etc. I talked to foundations and funders. But one of the scientists I interviewed, the author of the critical article, Martin Siegert, made me think hard about what I was doing. His main criticism of geoenegineering proposals like the curtain is they’re getting too much attention for the readiness level of the technology. Talking about them like they’re feasible gives a sense of false hope. The curtain, proposals to preserve sea ice by pumping seawater over it and to refreeze retreating glaciers to bedrock by pumping the lubricating meltwater out from their bases—all these ideas would be colossally expensive and potentially impossible to scale. To critics like Siegert, they’re dangerous distractions from the only real solution to climate change—decarbonization. Indeed, they’re band-aid fixes. They only treat the symptoms of climate change—slowing sea level rise driven by a warming atmosphere and ocean. But to proponents of research, they’re band-aids we might need to prevent some 200 million people from being forced from their homes by rising waters before we’re able to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Why not study them now to see if they’ll work?

But Siegert said something that really struck me:

“Any distraction, even a small distraction, will make it more difficult to decarbonize. I mean, everyone's got attention span. The fact that we're talking now on this and not talking about decarbonizing is an interesting thing, isn't it? The fact that you're interested in writing about geo engineering, not decarbonizing… So, yeah, so it is a distraction. I mean, it literally is a distraction.”

I thought hard about what I was doing after talking with him. This wasn’t ever going to be a puff piece for the curtain project’s research team. I was always going to give critics like Siegert a lot of space in the article. But just by writing about it in a major publication, was I giving it more air than it deserved? Certainly, whatever I wrote would end up forwarded to the project’s leaders and funders as evidence they were on the right track. Would I be responsible for that, as a journalist?

I don’t really have the answer to that question. I don’t know what impact my previous reporting had, if any, on the doomed Arctic Ice Project. What I do know is that I wrote a fair and balanced piece about research that I think will continue to be at the center of major debates in the coming decade. The climate is changing rapidly. The effects are getting harder to ignore. I don’t see a future in which a good number of scientists and major funders ignore geoengineering as a possibility (for better or worse).

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too):

How plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of Earth (Melissa Sevigny, High Country News)

• This is a really lovely profile of Tanya Atwater, the mother of plate tectonics. If you like this piece, check out Sevigny’s latest book, Brave the Wild River, about the first two botanists to survey the Grand Canyon’s plants.

What podcasts do to our brains (Adam Clark Estes, Vox)

• It had never occurred to me that someone one try “quitting podcasts.” TikTok, sure. Instagram, yeah. Podcasts? That’s how I get my news. I make them for a living! But yeah, I relate to “The Daily” while doing dishes and “Radiolab” while on a walk in the park. It’s not the worst idea to spend a bit more time alone with one’s thoughts…

My Rules of Radio (Erica Heilman, Transom)

• For audio journalism, there’s no better resource than Transom. But I think all forms of writing can benefit from the rules of good radio reporting. This is a masterclass.

Into the deep (Elie Dolgin, Science)

• Humans are heading to the Moon later this month for the first time in more than 50 years. This test flight, Artemis II, is supposed to set the stage for more missions to the Moon, Mars and farther into the solar system. There’s an elephant in the room, though—radiation.

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? (Natalie Wolchover, Quanta)

• Natalie Wolchover is just always a good read. It’s almost always hard for me to care about particle physics. And I read this.

One more thing

I mentioned in the last issue of this newsletter that my team at NASA had been working on a podcast series about the upcoming Artemis II launch. Well, now four of the five episodes are out on nasa.gov and wherever you listen to podcasts! We’re really proud of our work on this series. If you’re interested in space exploration and want to learn just about everything you need to know about of the launch, give it a listen!

As deep-sea mining race ramps up, mission will assess whether ecosystems recover afterward

A new series of research cruises will study rare abyssal species in areas slated for mining

At COP28 in Dubai the previous November (we’re talking 2023 now), I’d attended a bunch of sessions about deep-sea ecosystems—and was surprised to learn that coral reefs exist in the abyssal deep. Deep-sea creatures have been somewhat insulated from warming waters and human impacts so far. But with deep-sea mining on the horizon (and fisheries and oil exploration moving into deeper waters), these beautiful coral reefs in the dark seemed like charismatic examples of biodiversity at risk. Through an organization called CORDAP, I got in touch with a bunch of cold-water coral scientists, among them Rhian Waller, who was planning to study corals in a Chilean fjord in July of 2024.

I pitched Science a relatively unfocused feature story about corals and the intersection of a few overlapping races—to mine the deep sea and map it—science and politics and economics intertwined. Norway in particular was mapping its seabed (ostensibly for science) while planning to be the first country to mine it. Thus began a chain of some 80 emails back and forth with a couple of Science editors interested in the work in Norway and another project I’d gotten interested in, a European effort called MiningImpact (the focus of the above story published last week). This line of inquiry eventually led to a feature in Hakai Magazine that I traveled to Chile to report (Rhian Waller’s work) with Pulitzer Center funding and a piece for Smithsonian Magazine about the complicated history and geopolitics of deep-sea research in Norway. But not, immediately, a Science piece.

With a couple of editors there, I discussed various news pegs related to new research papers and decisions in the case of Norway’s deep-sea mining work (which was ultimately put on hold) over months. I gave up (temporarily) late in 2024, then reached out to my editor one more time in the summer of 2025—one of the researchers for MiningImpact had told me he was planning a new, third phase of the project that would cap off the work and inform the International Seabed Authority’s regulations for mining. Finally, I hoped, was enough of a news peg for Science to greenlight a deep-sea mining story (they don’t publish a ton of those). And here we are.

It’s really nice to finally get that piece out in the world, if a little underwhelming—there are so many pages of notes, emails, academic papers read, interviews done (at least a dozen) that didn’t make it into the final, pretty focused final news story. I think of news as the quickest of quick-turn genres of journalistic writing. In the past, I’ve written news stories for Science (typically new study stories) in a day or two, from pitch to publication. The fact that it’s been (I just checked) 600 days since I first dove into this topic is pretty wild—I certainly wouldn’t want to calculate my hourly rate for this one.

I have to remind myself that’s how this works sometimes, at least for me—an initial pitch that leads deep into a topic, resulting in (at best) a few stories for different outlets over a couple of years.

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too):

Science Keeps Changing. So Why Should We Trust It? (Elay Shech, The New York Times)

• This is a great op-ed. Science is not a uniform march towards truth—but that doesn’t mean we should give up on it. There’s a middle ground between “naive faith and wholesale pessimism.”

Moondoggle (Joel Achenbach, Slate)

• From the NASA communications perspective (and as a space nerd), it’s been a little baffling to see how little coverage NASA’s Artemis II mission has gotten so far. We’re a month away from humanity’s return to the Moon. And people I talk to on the street have no idea—Joel’s had the same experience, and writes about why.

The duo kite-skiing 4000 kilometres across Antarctica for science (Alec Luhn, New Scientist)

• I’m a sucker for a story about scientists in Antarctica, and this is a really unique project. I’ve been enjoying all of Alec Luhn’s stories as a staffer for New Scientist.

The 20 Best Podcasts of 2025 (Benjamin Cannon, The Atlantic)

• Podcasting is in a bad place as a medium—Serials are few and far between. Celebrity chat shows (and worse) are on the rise. Everyone’s pivoting to video. But there are still some pretty amazing, creative shows out there. I’ve added a ton to my watch list from Benjamin’s collection here.

One more thing…

After more than two years of work on the NASA audio team, we’re finally releasing a limited series all about Artemis II—NASA’s upcoming crewed mission to the Moon—on Curious Universe. The trailer dropped today, and episodes will release weekly this month. Super excited for this to be out in the world—I think it’s some of our best work. Tell your friends!

Professionally, it’s been a pretty tumultuous year to work in government—my main gig as a science writer and podcast producer for NASA. As a contract employee (not a civil servant), the start of the year was particularly confusing, trying to figure out which of a flurry of executive orders applied to me. With broad cuts to the federal workforce (and especially to science and communications departments), I spent many, many days just exhausted by the stress of wondering if our office would make it through the next round of cuts, and figuring out how we’d pick up the slack as many of our leaders and colleagues took deferred resignation offers. But we’re still here at the end of the year, and I still did work that I’m proud of, both for NASA as for a number of publications as a freelancer.

NASA stuff

In February, we debuted the new Hearing Hubble data sonification app at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, New York. The festival was a lot of fun—we organized a panel discussion with NASA astronaut Matt Dominick and musician Reggie Watts and met a lot of amazing audio producers/creators—like NPR’s Throughline team. I even managed to squeeze in quick trips to Scientific American’s HQ and WNYC in Manhattan to meet the Radiolab folks.

In April, leading up to Earth Day, we released a limited series on NASA’s Curious Universe podcast all about Earth science—which I’d been looking forward to since I joined the team as an intern back in 2022. We navigated a real gauntlet telling a story heavily focused on climate science given the political context, but it went through reviews with minor notes. NASA’s origins are closely tied to Earth observation technology—the agency studies this planet more than any other. We covered the benefits for everyday people of those science missions.

Then, it was the “Summer of Webb.” For the telescope’s anniversary, NASA produced an original documentary about its construction and launch called Cosmic Dawn. We helped with the rollout on social media and to theaters, produced a podcast episode companion featuring Nobel Laureate John Mather, and, throughout the fall, released a series of episodes about the telescope’s latest discoveries.

Magazine stuff

In my freelance work, I focused on a few big projects—quality over quantity, I guess! I wrote my first op-ed/reported essay for Undark about carbon capture pipelines in the Midwest, where I live. I reported a feature for Smithsonian about the history of deep-sea mining (and the complex web of government, industry and academia that drives science in the oceans). After many months in limbo (while the outlet navigated how political it wanted to be this year), a piece I pitched about fungal disease, climate change and cuts to the CDC’s disease detectives program for National Geographic was finally published.

The story I’m probably most proud of this year was a longform, narrative feature for bioGraphic about a problem close to my heart (and to me geographically)—herbicide drift from crop fields killing oak trees in the Midwest. It was a lot of fun to get out into the field to report, to work with Krista Langlois, the magazine’s fantastic features editor, again, and to get this piece out there (which took most of the year!).

2026?

In the coming year, I’m looking forward to writing more of these behind-the-scenes dispatches to share what went into reporting stories, bits that didn’t make the final cut, and just things I want to write but can’t find the right outlet for.

I’ve also got a few big things in the works I’m looking forward to. In February, NASA’s Artemis II mission to the Moon will (hopefully) launch, with four astronauts onboard. On the agency audio team, we’ve been working for months (really, years, if you count the past mission delays) on a limited series about the mission. We’ve interviewed the crew multiple times, sent senior producer and host Jacob Pinter to Kennedy and Johnson to do interviews with people working behind the scenes and more. It’s a big moment for NASA, and hopefully this series will be a hit.

I’m also deep in edits right now for my first print feature story for National Geographic, which will be in the magazine next summer. I’ve learned a lot about how the magazine works—from photo editing to fact checking—and am looking forward to sharing more when the piece is finally out.

Thanks, as always, for reading! Hope you had a good 2025. Here’s to 2026!

P.S. Wanna send your name to space?

First, it’s time for Smithsonian Magazine’s annual roundup of the 10 best science books of the year. Each fall, editors ask a handful of contributors to suggest and review their favorites. Here’s what I wrote about mine:

In the introduction to Is a River Alive?, British nature writer Robert Macfarlane recalls posing that titular, driving question to his young son. “Well, duh,” the 9-year-old replies. “That’s going to be a short book then, Dad.”

In the three parts that follow, Macfarlane embarks on a quest to visit great rivers across the world—hiking through the Los Cedros Cloud-Forest in Ecuador, riding a school bus alongside the polluted waterways of Chennai, India, and paddling the snarling Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River) to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. In doing so, he hopes to learn to see the more-than-human world as his child does and as Indigenous peoples long have: as a universe of beings with inherent rights.

If it’s hard to imagine a river as alive, Macfarlane writes, imagine it dead. That might be a much easier prospect. The polluted and desiccated rivers we see on the news or pass by without a thought in our daily lives give a moral urgency to the growing rights of nature movement, which seeks to grant legal protection to ecosystems so that they might stand as plaintiffs in cases alleging harm to their wellbeing.

Is a River Alive? is Macfarlane at his best—he waxes delightfully poetic about majestic trees, unassuming fungi, colorful moths and rippling streams, traipses through forests with a cast of larger-than-life characters and invites all of us to approach and care for the natural world in a new (yet also ancient) way. —Christian Elliott

I also have a new story out this week online in Sierra Magazine about an innovative community-led effort to monitor and warn for debris flow landslides in Southeast Alaska, now entering its tenth year. I learned about the project while I was up in Alaska this past summer reporting an upcoming National Geographic feature on deep-seated landslides (a distinct geologic phenomenon). I immediately wondered if grassroots disaster warning systems like this one could be a way forward more broadly in the U.S., given major cuts to key government agencies this past year.

Oh, and one more thing. It’s Spotify Wrapped day today (for those who celebrate). If you’re a top listener to any of NASA’s podcasts (and you should be!), you’ll get this special video message from your space agency’s Artemis II astronaut crew, who will fly around the Moon early next year:

Here’s the story:

The Scourge of Native Oaks is Blowing in the Wind

Scientists and conservationists in the U.S. Midwest are working to stop herbicides from industrial agriculture from drifting onto the region’s remaining hardwood trees.

In the absence of any organized statewide monitoring program, Prairie Rivers Network had started their own — a handful of volunteers traveling across the state collecting leaf samples and assessing trees for signs of herbicide injury in state nature preserves, public parks and on private land. The scale of the problem they identified was so vast, the state Department of Natural Resources had to act, commissioning their own study from the Illinois Natural History Survey. This scrappy nonprofit forcing the state to act drew me in, plus the fact that this ecological crisis is one you can see and touch and connect with in your backyard, if you live in the Midwest. Once you learn to see the signs of herbicide injury — the curled and cupped leaves, the dying branches — you can’t unsee them. It’s everywhere.

I pitched the (fantastic) features editor at bioGraphic Magazine, Krista Langlois, in early February after a couple of preliminary interviews with the folks at Prairie Rivers Network, and the editorial team commissioned a story — like a lot of outlets, they don’t get too many pitches about the Midwest/from writers based here. It also helped there was a strong biodiversity angle — the main threat from herbicide drift is the loss of native plant species.

I made a really intentional decision last year to try to find and pitch stories close by — ones about places and issues that I’m already somewhat familiar with, things I might take for granted or just not pay attention to day to day, but which could be of interest to a national audience. That Undark op-ed came out of that decision, and a forthcoming essay in Noema Magazine about prairie remnants. I’m usually drawn to stories in dramatic, unfamiliar places — Antarctica, the deep sea, Alaskan glaciers. I’ve always figured my home states (Iowa and Illinois) were just too boring for coastal and big city publications (or readers) to care about. Focusing locally, seeing the world around me as worthy of national attention, was a good challenge. And (to some extent) outlets have been interested in my ideas. It also makes field reporting a lot easier (and cheaper)!

I traveled twice to report this piece: to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May to visit a lab studying herbicide drift and throughout central and southern Illinois on the Fourth of July to follow Prairie Rivers Network’s intrepid field researchers, Marty Kemper and Kim Erndt-Pitcher, on a sampling day. I’d planned to do the field reporting all around the same time, but the fieldwork kept getting delayed by weather. Krista was very patient with the delays and I’m glad I was able to get out into the field — I ended up with so many little narrative details that really bring a longform feature like this to life.

For example, the slogan for a company that supplies the caterpillars University of Illinois research scientist T.J. Benson tests herbicides on: “The Insects You Need, When You Need Them.” (I took a picture so I’d remember it for the story):

As we walked together from one of the university’s greenhouses, where the researchers apply herbicides like 2,4-D to oak samplings in controlled experiments, Benson noticed the smell of that herbicide (which is devastating oaks across the state) in the air — it had recently been sprayed on the building’s landscaping. I knew that was going in the story. I could not have asked for a better scene.

I spent a whole day following Marty and Kim along in the field, getting to know them as characters in the story. They really cared about teaching me to see the natural world as they do — it’s almost a curse, knowing what’s really happening. That sunk in for me as we drove through a campground full of oblivious families enjoying the holiday. You just want to shake them (which I hope this story does)! Marty handed me his binoculars over and over, telling me to look at this tree or that one, rattling off the different ways herbicide injury presents on different species. My memory of a college class on Midwestern tree identification was really put to the test. I couldn’t have written this story without really learning to see the consequences of herbicide drift like this. I hope including myself in the story helps readers connect with the personal journey of discovery I went on.

I hope the little character details I was able to include — like Marty and Kim bickering over turning on the car’s air conditioning or Marty’s enduring love for Dairy Queen (he made us stop and insisted I try the “moo-latte") — help audiences see these environmentalists as well-rounded, real people and empathize with how much they care about holding power to account and protecting native ecosystems. It was also just a gift that the field reporting day fell on the Fourth of July — with barbeques and red-white-and-blue bunting and small-town parades to contrast with the haze of chemicals and dying trees. Now that’s Americana.

I ran into a few challenges with this piece. For one thing, the news kept changing — EPA policy rollbacks, changing rules on dicamba, one of the key pesticides that causes drift injury — every day there was a new headline. I’m really grateful to the magazine’s fact checking team (Skylar Knight) for triple checking everything and making sure the story was up-to-date (at least, as of this week). Also, every time you get really deep into reporting a feature you can start to write like too much of an insider, assuming knowledge your audience doesn’t have. That was a real problem for me with this one, since I grew up around farming. Krista gently reminded me that readers might not know what a boom arm is or how pesticides are applied or even how much of the Midwest is made up of cornfields. I just looked back at my folder for this story and it went through seven full rounds of edits before the fact check. Longform features take a long time!

One more thing I’ve never run into before — a source passed away before publication. During the fact checking process, I learned that Larry Harper, a visit to whose property I used in the conclusion/kicker of the piece, died unexpectedly earlier this fall. I had to call up his widow, Shelley, to fact check silly, minor details from that section of the story, like what Larry was wearing when we visited him (I didn’t take a photo, so it had to be confirmed with her). I was really nervous to do that and it was an emotional call, but Shelley seemed to really enjoy the chance to talk about her late husband and the things he said. Krista suggested adding an “In Memorium” paragraph to the end of the story, which I’m really glad we did.

Thanks for reading the piece, if you do — I spent a very long time on it. I hope it reaches a wide audience and helps spread awareness a little bit. Let me know if you have any questions about it!

One more thing: last month, I drove into Chicago for the National Association of Science Writers/Council for the Advancement of Science Writing annual conference (ScienceWriters2025). I enjoyed meeting some of you there! A standout session for me covered writer/editor relationships and resulted in the following crowd-sourced wisdom of dos and do nots:

I also won a The Open Notebook baseball cap in a raffle, so all in all, 10/10 conference. Hope to see some of you again next year in Corvallis, Oregon!

I ended up pitching the story to Smithsonian. A few months later, the marketing/communications professional I connected with at NYU for that story pitched me another idea—a project using AI to identify migratory birds at night using their short flight calls. That one ended up in MIT Technology Review as a story about the growing field of acoustic ecology.

I’m telling you all this because a few months ago, that same communications officer reached out to me again, this time with an offer: would I like to write a feature for the university’s annual magazine? There was one guideline—it had to feature four scientists from the Tandon School of Engineering the communications team had selected. The research and engineering work all four specialized in related to the natural world, they told me, but it would be up to me to find a good throughline and organize a story around that.

Here’s what I came up with:

The Birds and the Bees (Of Engineering): How NYU Tandon is partnering with nature to develop new solutions to the challenges we face

If you happen to get NYU’s annual magazine in the mail, you can read the story in print as well.

I almost never get assignments. Before I sign a freelance contract, I’ve usually put many hours into pre-reporting and carefully crafting a pitch with a unique angle. This piece was a fun and different kind of challenge. I cheated a little, I admit, by asking each scientist what common thread united their research with that of their colleagues. They had a wide variety of answers! The thing that kept coming up was taking inspiration from nature.

I really wanted to go beyond the sort of trite “scientists/engineers are inspired by/take from the natural world for their designs” angle, though, and the scientists were game to do that. Hence, the partnership angle:

Many engineers look to biology for inspiration—to find designs evolution has already perfected and copy them. But Porfiri thinks it’s more complicated. “Evolution is not necessarily good, he says, “It’s very opaque.” If you copy an element of the natural world without understanding why it evolved the way it did. “You’re building a chip for an algorithm, but maybe the algorithm was meant for something else.” He sees his work as a two-way interaction between the animal kingdom and engineering—“scientifically principled biological inspiration.”

I think my main takeaway from all this is that it’s really important to build good relationships with communications and public affairs officers. A lot of them have a good ear for stories and they can make or break your chances of getting an interview with the expert you want, especially at government agencies where access can be trickier. And writing for university publications can still be creative, fun and engaging (and you can be compensated well for it). The editors at NYU really wanted a journalistic piece, and they were lovely to work with.

The point is, these fish have been making headlines in the Midwest for as long as I can remember, and they still are—there was this great story just a few days ago by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco at WBEZ/Grist about the Brandon Road Interbasin project, an expensive underwater barrier effort that could stop the fish from reaching Lake Michigan once and for all. Other than big developments like that one, though, it can be hard to find a fresh angle on an environment/climate/science story that’s been around the block.

So today, I thought I’d share a couple of ways I’ve tried to do just that, focused on the Mississippi carp story. I decided to write this after coming across this Reddit thread recently in the r/NativePlantGardening subreddit (shout out to one of my fave subreddits) asking if Asian countries like Japan and China are plagued by invasive species from North America, the way we have the tree of heaven, “murder” hornets, lantern flies, etc of “Asian” origin here. That thread blew up with responses—apparently Canada goldenrod is all over China, Japan has invasive raccoons that started life as pets and American bullfrogs are all over Singapore (Full disclosure: I have not fact checked those comments). Anyway, that post reminded me of my very first National Geographic story, still one of the pieces I’m most proud of today: The prince, the mayor, and the U.S. fish that ate Japan.

The story behind that piece starts back in 2020, when I was working as a production assistant for the local NPR member station at my college campus, transcribing and editing episodes of a radio show from the 1990s that the station wanted to publish as a podcast for the program’s anniversary. One of those 3-minute segments, called “Exotic Fish,” knocked me out of a transcription trance—the host, the late Roald Tweet (whose voice I became very familiar with), said that during a visit to Chicago in 1960, Japan’s emperor had been given a gift of bluegill by the mayor which, when released in the palace’s moats, took over Japan’s waterways. I wasn’t sure I believed it—the program, “Rock Island Lines,” had a tendency to go a little river folktale-y. But the way Tweet (facetiously) framed the story—as perhaps intentional revenge on “Asia” for the invasive carp (even then making the news in Illinois) struck me:

Someone in Illinois or Japan had better put an end to the gift exchange soon, or in another 40 years, the water around the Imperial Palace may have to be renamed the “Mississippi River,” while the stream between Illinois and Iowa will become “Imperial Moat Number Seven.”

I made a note of the episode (it was then scheduled to publish years later, in 2023) and decided to come back to the story later and try to figure out how true it was (I couldn’t find anything about it online). A year later, in grad school, it seemed like the perfect thing to look into for a Chicago-focused science and environmental reporting class. I interviewed a bunch of Japanese scientists and dug into newspaper archives. My first draft of the story was incredibly long and told two stories in parallel—the introduction of carp from China into the Mississippi River and the (incredibly, true) tale of the disastrous gift of bluegill to Japan.

I pitched the piece to Rob Kunzig, then a science editor at National Geographic. The angle, flipping the typical U.S.-focused invasive species story on its head, intrigued him. He cut most of the carp origin story to center the bluegill part, but kept the framing, which I (sort of) owe to Tweet. That angle led me to ask Japanese scientists about invasive species in the U.S., resulting in some interesting comparisons:

Over the past decade, Japanese and U.S. scientists have occasionally swapped advice and methods for controlling their respective invasives. Irons’ teams collect water samples to test for DNA from sloughed-off carp cells, a technique pioneered by Japanese geneticists to track bluegill. In 2012, Nakai Katsuki, the Lake Biwa Museum fish researcher, flew to St. Paul, Minnesota to present advances in electrofishing and artificial nests design to a conference of carp managers. He remembers eating fried silver carp, rebranded “silverfin.”

And that last little tidbit, about rebranding invasive silver carp in an attempt to get people to eat them, led later to a whole separate story in Sierra Magazine, in which I ended up using a lot of the reporting that didn’t make it into the National Geographic piece. The same fish were undergoing yet another rebrand for the same reason—this time as “Copi.” The impact of names, and all the rhetoric around that time (2022) about immigration, anti-Asian hate and “invasion” of the U.S., got me thinking and researching again, and the Copi rebrand became a way in to talk about those issues and question whether we should be calling species “invasive” at all, with the careful guidance of then-editor Jen Rose Smith.

That National Geographic piece (and, indirectly, the Sierra one) has kept giving. In 2023, Ellie Katz, a producer at Interlochen Public Radio, reached out to me about telling the story on their fantastic Points North podcast. They interviewed me and talked to some of the sources I’d interviewed a couple of years before, which was really cool to see. And that piece used the same framing I’d picked up from Tweet:

Here in the Great Lakes, we do a lot of the same exact things to stop invasive species, and then some: Electric shock barriers to prevent invasive carp from entering Lake Michigan. Pesticides to kill sea lamprey. Divers to scrape zebra mussels off by hand. We’re right to worry about some of these new species – their arrival has fundamentally altered the ecosystems we love. But sometimes we forget we’re not the only ones dealing with this. Invasive species are a global problem – from the Great Lakes, to Japan, and everywhere in between. And we contribute to that problem. But there’s this weird thing we do: We talk about these species like they are foreign invaders and we are under attack.

And it added the danger of using racist and xenophobic narratives to talk about the species from other places causing problems here in the U.S.

I think all this stood out to me originally because in college I studied cultural anthropology and environmental science—I came to journalism later. In environmental fields, the concept of invasive species isn’t always interrogated especially critically. I certainly spent many long hours trapping insects and yanking out/cutting down invasives to maintain oak savannah and prairie ecosystems working as a research assistant without ever really thinking about the words I was using. But anthropology has a tendency to be critical of everything, and the goal of “making the familiar strange” (and the strange familiar) has always stuck with me. I think that’s a good way to approach journalism, especially with topics that feel like well-trodden ground. Is there an inverse to a story? Someone trying to challenge a narrative we’ve taken for granted? Something surprising?

If you want a more thorough and helpful guide to finding story angles, I highly recommend The Open Notebook’s master class series, delivered daily via email. “How to Find an Angle for Any Science Story” is a great one to start with—I completed it a couple of weeks ago.

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too):

Anthropology x Journalism

Emily writes on applying anthropological methods to solve journalistic challenges (and more)!

By Emily Kennedy

First, I want to recommend ’s newsletter, Anthropology x Journalism, which I’ve really been enjoying. I sort of got interested in journalism in the first place from a great talk the science journalist Ed Yong gave at an anthropology conference in 2020 about the importance of thinking ethnographically when telling stories about COVID—including the perspectives of social scientists, talking about complexity and systems, etc. If you’d prefer a podcast, there’s a This Anthro Life episode featuring Emily. The Centre for Anthropology and Journalism is also a good resource.

The Reported Essay

Tackling Science Narratives

This week, the National Association of Science Writers announced its winners of the 2025 Science in Society Journalism Awards for Books, Science Reporting, Science Features, Longform Narratives, Series, and Commentary…

Read more

9 months ago · 13 likes · Erika Hayasaki

I also enjoyed this edition of ’s excellent newsletter. She won the National Association of Science Writers’ big prize for a longform feature in MIT Technology Review about the way DNA tech is transforming disaster response. This is a Q&A with her editor about how the story came together.

Now, some other stuff:

Nobel Prizes This Year Offer Three Cheers for Slow Science (Katrina Miller, The New York Times)

• I think it’s so important in this year of massive cuts to federal science budgets, staffing and universities, to highlight the importance of basic science and the unexpected places seemingly simple (even silly) research questions can lead. This is a great angle for what could have been a straightforward story about the Nobel prizes this year.

Re:Public is reporting stories about the lands that belong to all of us (Neel Dhansesha, NiemanLab)

• I’m so happy to see a new publication focused on public lands, especially from the laid-off editor-in-chief of the now-gutted Outside Magazine. Looking forward to reading, and it looks like they’re looking for pitches…

The Rise of Durian Diplomacy (Gloria Dickie, Foreign Policy)

• is clearly already making the most of her new home base in Bangkok with this great story about the role of durian in politics.

Hot Water: How much are oceans warming? (JoeElla Carman/Brian Resnick, National Geographic)

• I love a good “scrollytelling” feature, and I haven’t seen National Geographic do many of these in the past. I really enjoyed this one by Joella Carman and .

Will Science Journalism Funders Step Up or Retreat? (Claudia López Lloreda, Undark)

• Speaking of anthropology and journalism, I was really sad to see Sapiens go this summer. That’s the opening for this piece, which dives into the funding crisis that science journalism faces and some potential solutions.

As a science reporter, the characters I follow in my stories tend to be… scientists. Chemists, glaciologists, geologists, paleontologists. I like to get out into the field with them, follow them around. They can be funny, quirky, serious, (and almost always) deeply passionate about their niche areas of research. Covering them has its challenges, sure—getting them to talk about the big-picture/broad implications of their work, explaining the nuances in ways general audiences can understand, etc. But at least with Earth scientists, they nor their work tend to be very controversial/political (or at least, not until recently).

But for this landslides story to work, I needed to go beyond the researchers studying the hazard and the open scientific questions/mysteries they’re chipping away at. The science is a fascinating, key element, but the story needed to also get at the stakes—at the people actually affected by the hazard (and by the science) on the ground. And it turns out that can be a lot more controversial—and outside my wheelhouse.

I intended to visit Glacier View, a community of roughly 300 Alaskans scattered along the Matanuska river valley an hour or so outside of Anchorage. It’s an absolutely beautiful place—many residents have backyard views of the Matanuska Glacier (hence the name). But it’s also a pretty complicated, diverse place, especially politically. When scientists had first rolled into town and announced Glacier View’s mountains were full of creeping permafrost landslides that could collapse catastrophically, a pretty big debate broke out over whether the community should pursue more scientific research to accurately assess the hazard at all. There were (and still are) plenty of people who said no—worried about potential implications to property values and insurance rates.

I tend to think of research and data as inherently good. I was a little taken aback by these people who didn’t want to know what exactly they faced—how big the risk was. But I get it. If your house hasn’t been taken out by a landslide in a century, that sudden possibility seems a little crazy. And if a scientist says there’s now a 1 in 30 chance it happens in a given year and your insurance company decides to pull your coverage, that’s not great. And by going to Glacier View, I was involving myself in all this—what if my story, a feature in a major outlet, somehow tipped off the insurance industry to take a closer look at the town? I expected plenty of people wouldn’t see the benefit in talking with me. So, with several months ahead before my trip, I tried to put serious legwork into connecting with potential sources ahead of time and announcing my arrival.

After a couple of calls, one resident on the pro-science side offered to interview me on the local radio station, Big Cabbage Radio. I have no idea who/how many people heard the broadcast, but I really appreciated the chance to explain who I was, what my story was about, why I was coming to Glacier View and how people could get in touch and meet with me when I arrived. I’d never done something quite like this before—the radio interview let me make my case to residents as to why they should consider talking to me, all in conversation with the host, a trusted voice in the community. He suggested I get in touch with the local paper, The Glacier View Gazette, to put out an informational ad to viewers, which was helpful.

Most impactful, though, was having a local guide. The scientist at the heart of this story, a geologist named Hig, is also an Alaskan and has spent years traveling to communities like Glacier View. Early on in our conversations he wasn’t sure if he wanted me to accompany him into the community, since he’s still trying to build trust there. Eventually he came around to the idea, in part I think because I’d secured interviews on my own with a few key sources, like the head of the Bible camp in Glacier View and a few residents. Tagging along with Hig really opened doors—in a couple of cases, he explicitly vouched for me to residents who were unsure about going on the record, telling them he trusted me as a reporter (with a few nuanced stories about Alaska under my belt) and thought it could help the community to get the story out there. That’s usually the journalist’s job, but I think it was a lot more effective coming from Hig.

Looking back, I’m pretty happy with my trip to Glacier View. Following Hig in the field, we covered a lot of ground—visiting communities and research sites spread out of over hundreds of miles. We only had two days to spend in Glacier View proper. I had to make some hard decisions about where to go there. So I do have some regrets. By following Hig, I really only had the chance to interview pro-science residents and ones who’d come around to the science. I really wish I’d have been able to make it to the local lodge/coffee shop where locals gather on Wednesday mornings—I got the tip from several residents that would be the place to go to meet some folks more skeptical of the science. Several people I specifically reached out to for that perspective via email/phone didn’t respond to my requests. But skipping the coffee shop let me get to the Bible camp, where I landed a really fantastic interview I hadn’t expected to get. Before making that decision, I got on the phone with my editor, who affirmed my choice.

So, my biggest takeaways for dealing with tricky communities:

• Start thinking of ways to make connections/build rapport well ahead of your trip (Phone calls, Zoom meetings).

• Try to find unconventional ways of reaching your sources ahead of time by meeting them where they are—like via a radio interview or newspaper ad.

• Get yourself a trusted local guide who can help introduce you to people who might be reluctant to be interviewed (and vouch for you).

• It helps a lot to have a proven record of writing balanced stories about the place you’re going before you try for a more challenging community.

• Before you travel, talk with your editor about communications—see if they’d be willing to jump on a phone call while you’re out in the field to help make difficult, time-sensitive decisions.

Do you have insights to add (they are welcome—I’m new to this!). Send a message or leave a comment on Substack:

Leave a comment

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too). As usual, a mix of meta stuff about science journalism and some just plain good long reads and features.

A Teen, a Reporter, and a Grand Jury Leak (Over BBQ) (Brian Reed, Question Everything)

• I highly recommend Brian Reed’s (host of S-Town and The Trojan Horse Affair) newest podcast, Question Everything, a show about the moral complexities of journalism. Speaking of not always getting everything you want on a reporting trip, in this episode Reed travels to Alabama where two local journalists were arrested for reporting on secret documents they acquired legally. Absolutely no one is willing to talk to him—until on his last day reporting, he meets a teen in a BBQ joint who wants to be interviewed. That becomes the entire story.

Roundtable: How to Cover Science During Sociopolitical Disruption (Rachel Crowell, The Open Notebook)

• TON has been putting out a lot of great pieces with guidance for journalists covering the science under the second Trump administration—who suddenly find their beat involving a lot more policy and politics than ever before.

How We Came To Know Earth (Quanta Magazine)

• I absolutely love this ambitious package of stories from Quanta about how we’ve come to understand our home planet—through a series of pieces on climate science. A couple of highlights for me are Zack Savitsky’s piece on how far the goal of modeling our climate with computers has come and a story by Robin George Andrews comparing the greenhouse effect on Venus and Earth.

This is the best evidence yet for ancient life on Mars (Liz Landau, National Geographic)

• Big planetary science news this week—after a year of trying, the world’s scientists have been unable to prove that rocks the Perseverance rover collected on Mars are not a potential biosignature. It’s the best evidence yet of ancient life there. And this piece is the first for Nat Geo for my former NASA colleague Liz Landau as a new editor for the magazine!

The Secret Lives of Dead Trees (Stephen Ornes, Scientific American)

• I’m a sucker for tree stories and this is a lovely feature about a scientist who’s dedicated his career to studying how logs decay. The photography is really moody and great and I also love the companion video Sci Am produced for this piece.

I spoke with Helzer for a forthcoming piece in Noema Magazine about the tiny fragments of prairie that remain throughout Iowa and Illinois on pioneer cemeteries—and the fierce debates those remnants spark at the intersection of nature, culture and what’s sacred. Helzer had a lot of great insights about communicating with the public about conservation that probably won’t make it into the final piece. So this week, I thought I’d share the full interview as a Q&A. I started by asking him to describe America’s prairie as it once was, at its fullest extent…

CHRIS HELZER: The tallgrass prairie sort of feathers out of the woodlands on the eastern edge of the central U.S., so places like Ohio, Indiana, would be on the far edge of that tallgrass prairie. And the further west you go, the less rainfall you have, the less productive soils you have, and so the vegetation gets a little shorter, until you get out into the really droughty western plains where the grass is not very tall. I think one of the most important aspects of that, though, is that in the East, prairie really wants to be trees, or the landscape is always sort of pushing itself toward being a woodland, and what keeps it from being a woodland is is people managing land, and that's been the case for 10,000 years or so.

Prairies are basically a human construct. That's definitely true for tallgrass prairies, because as you think about the last of the ice sheets receding, 8 to 12,000 years ago, depending on where you're at, people were here on the landscape. They were actively using fire as well as lots of other land management tools. And they basically, by using fire especially, directed the way those landscapes formed themselves after the ice left. And instead of having dense woodlands, we had open woodlands. And then in a lot of places, grasslands that were maintained from becoming trees by fire. And then the further west you go, the less important fire is in terms of keeping grasslands grasslands.

But especially in the East, if you just back away and let it do what it wants, it will become trees. It’s a really cool example of this intrinsic interrelationship, interconnection between people and nature that has been going on for a long time that sort of flies In the face of a lot of what most people would think about in terms of nature, right? The whole “let nature take its course” thing, or “wilderness as a place without people,” all those sorts of things break down very quickly in the tallgrass prairie, because without people, we probably wouldn't have tallgrass prairie in most of the places we see it today.

CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: I've heard people describe it as, it's this part of the country that gets enough rain that this tall grass can grow, but also it wouldn't be there at all, like you're saying, If there weren't also these fires on a landscape that don't occur at high enough rates naturally to burn everything up.

CHRIS: Yeah, you go to the Southeast U.S., you have enough lightning fires that those long leaf pine ecosystems, for example, which are basically grasslands with trees, those would have been maintained historically just by lightning fires. But yeah, in the upper Midwest, the Eastern Great Plains, it was really people using fire that created and maintained those prairies.

CHRISTIAN: So, speaking of people maintaining and managing prairies, I would love to hear about what The Nature Conservancy's role is, kind of across the Midwest. I mean, it sounds like there's pretty significant amounts of land under Nature Conservancy management out in Nebraska, but I know there's at least some areas even here in Illinois and in Iowa. So what's that role look like?

CHRIS: In Nebraska, we have focused on just a couple of couple of places where we own and manage land. We used to have a few more other spots. We sort of whittled it down over the years so we could really focus on doing good management and being very experimental in a few places. In Iowa they've done some of the same things, where they they had a lot more small prairies scattered around, because at the time and still, there's an urgency to protect some of those last little bits from being plowed up, because we've got very productive soil so it makes sense to do a lot of farming, but also would be great to keep a few places that are still prairie. So I think the Nature Conservancy got involved and had more scattered, small prairies in Iowa than we've ever had in Nebraska. And in Illinois. It's sort of in between. There's places like the Nachusa Grasslands in Illinois, which is one of the absolute best places to go see tallgrass prairie in the world. And they're trying to grow that, make it larger.

I think in all three states, there is a focus on not just keeping it from being destroyed, but making sure we manage it well, restoring what we can around it to make those little pieces bigger and more functional, and then learning everything we can so that we can be part of that community of people that are trying to figure out how to steward these prairies into the future and maintain the biodiversity and functions that they have.

CHRISTIAN: I'm sure management also varies across all those areas. But in the areas that you're responsible for, how involved is management? Like, what kinds of things you have to do throughout the year to maintain these prairies?

CHRIS: So the further east you go, the more prevalent fire is and the more frequently used fire is, and the further west you go, we still use fire, but grazing becomes a bigger piece of the puzzle. Most of the reason for that is cultural. Nebraska, for example, we have a lot more of a ranching culture and just a lot more cattle running around than you have in Illinois. And so we graze prairies partly because we can, but mostly because there's a lot of benefits, especially from a habitat standpoint, from that grazing. And we have large enough prairies that it makes more sense to invest in the infrastructure that you need to do grazing where in the East, you tend to have smaller prairies, where it's just a 20-acre or 5-acre prairie, or, like you were talking about, a railroad right of way or a cemetery prairie. Cattle grazing doesn't make sense, Bison grazing sure doesn't make sense. So fire is important everywhere, I would say, but in Nebraska I think we have more tools available.

The other piece that's really important is the invasive species control, which can be handled a lot of different ways. But the the key is we've got these invasive plants. Some of those are woody plants. Some of those are not. If we don't suppress them and keep them from becoming dominant, they have the potential to form monocultures and decrease the plant community diversity, which ripples through the entire ecosystem. And so there's a combination of herbicides, mowing, pulling things out of the ground, cutting things down, that is really, really important to keep that plant community from becoming less diverse, less resilient. And fire alone usually doesn't cover all that. So in the East, fire is sort of the background management, where you burn at a frequency that helps keep the shrubbiness and the woodiness of the of the prairies limited. And then on top of that, you come in and do more of a surgical approach, usually, to take care of any invasives that are trying to come in.

CHRISTIAN: I know that there's a lot of pulling garlic mustard and woody things, especially in these cemetery prairies where they're kind of these oak savannah ecosystems where it's already kind of trying to become woods, like you were saying.

CHRIS: Man, those those small patches are so challenging because there's not a lot of room for error. Once a species disappears from a little spot like that, it's real unlikely that a lot of them are going to come back, because it's a small, isolated place. You don't have other prairies that are nearby. You don't have a matrix of prairie around you where the species can just recolonize from. And so you're trying to be very careful not to eliminate anything that's there. And one of the ways to do that, for example, is if you have a small, isolated prairie and you burn the whole thing, no matter what time of year you burn it, there's going to be some species that are in that prairie that are going to be hurt by that. You could potentially eliminate a population of insects, for example, by burning a prairie. So ideally, you'd say, “well, let's just burn a piece of it at a time, rotate that around so we never burn all of it.” But when you're dealing with a couple acres like that, just becomes infeasible. And then if you burn too infrequently, it gets swamped out by trees. There's no good solution, where in a bigger prairie there's a lot more cushion. There, you can experiment. You can break things up into pieces. You can create more of a shifting mosaic of management, which is what we really focus on here in Nebraska, which is a luxury in a lot of ways, compared to what people are dealing with in in the East.

The other piece of that is, because it’s small and surrounded by non-prairie, you just have a much heavier load of invasive species trying to come in and trees and shrubs trying to come in. You’ve got pressure from every direction, and so trying to fight that off and maintain the integrity of these little prairies is just, it's almost impossible. But the real answer there, the only long-term answer that I know of is to make those prairies bigger. To find ways to restore land around them and increase the size and connectivity between them. And that's really great in concept, and we know it can work, but it's just not feasible in a lot of places because you're surrounded by developments, so the price of land doesn't make sense, or all those other things that you probably have already heard from lots of people.

CHRISTIAN: A lot of corn everywhere.

CHRIS: A lot of corn.

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CHRISTIAN: I want to make sure I ask you this. I’m really curious about conflicts and challenges that come into management. Especially in the cemetery prairies here in Illinois, there’s a lot of pushback from residents about these places that they expect to look a certain way as cemeteries. There are these cultural conflicts and debates about management going on. And I’m sure the debates are different out there where you are further west, but I’m sure there are debates. What has that looked like for you? What sorts of issues have you run into?

CHRIS: I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that prairies are an under-appreciated ecosystem. When people think of prairies, they either think of the big swaths of prairie that you saw in Little House on the Prairie or in documentaries or TV shows or movies with these huge landscapes full of prairie. Or you think of them as these sort of flat, boring areas full of grass. So if you don't have the scale, it's a lot harder to get people excited about prairies and the aesthetics of them, because a lot of the really cool parts of those small prairies, you have to get in them and sort of sink into them and look closely to see it. And once you do, it's amazing. It's complex and beautiful and dynamic and all those sorts of things, but from an outside perspective, it doesn't match up with what most people think of when they think about nature or beauty.

There’s a lot of sociological research that has shown that what people think of as the most attractive landscape apart from big mountain vistas or whatever is that savannah-type habitat. That really resonates with a lot of people, think of the way we manicure our parks, right? Short grass, scattered trees, a lot of space in between them. I think all of those things combined meaning mean that there's a lot of conflicts over removing trees, for example, from these little prairies, because people see that as the nature that they recognize and are most familiar with. And they know that birds nest in trees, and they grew up learning about nature, usually, from a tree's perspective. And so, of course they're confused by the fact that people that are supposed to be doing nature conservation are getting rid of trees in these natural areas. That just doesn't make sense to them.

I think the other big conflict is sort of the messiness of it, right? And the cemeteries, of course, are where you see a lot of that. People have this idea in their head that cemeteries are these very neatly manicured areas, they're respectful, they're quiet, all that. And so when you have prairie vegetation that grows sort of tall and sprangly, and you've got all the noise of insects and all those sorts of things. It just looks messy because they don't have an aesthetic in their head that fits with what a prairie can look like in terms of beauty, if that makes sense.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah it does. I've seen some of these big prairies in like Kansas that stretch almost as far as you could see and are very striking. But I get that you have to be closer up to see what the fuss is about with these smaller prairies. I'm wondering, I saw your square meter prairie project. Is that a way of trying to draw attention to just like how much detail and how much diversity is in even a really, really small patch?

CHRIS: It’s absolutely one of the big goals of the project to highlight that diversity, but also the beauty, right? It’s partly an inventory project, where I'm trying to show people how many species I can find, but it's also a lot about how fulfilling it is for me to sit and look at a small space and how many different things I can see, not just necessarily species, but all the stories that play out, all the all the beauty of the way the light hits things at different times of day or different parts of the season. And if I can spend an hour a day looking at a square meter of prairie and always find things that are interesting, imagine what you could find in a 3-acre prairie, right? Or a 20 acre prairie?

Hopefully I’m showing people that you can find that somewhere close to you, if it's a prairie in town that you can drive to, but even if it's just a little piece of your backyard, or a couple of pots on your balcony, or the little weeds growing up in the cracks of the sidewalk. Any of those spaces are going to have things happening that if you spend the time looking, you can find them and appreciate them.

CHRISTIAN: And I suppose if you’re willing to spend that time and pay attention, that’s a good gateway to caring, right?

CHRIS: The thing with prairies is that if you haven’t been brought up with them, if nobody's really introduced you to them and taken you out by the hand and shown you what's there, it just doesn't seem like a place worth spending time in, right? You look at it from the outside, you don't see much. Maybe you'll hit it at the time where there's a whole bunch of flowers blooming and think “oh that’s pretty.”

But then you also combine that with the fact that for many people, when they think about nature, one of the big emotions they feel is fear, right? They're they're worried about “what's hiding in that tall grass if I start walking out there? I don't want ticks, I don't want snakes, I don't want spiders, there's probably mosquitoes,” all these things that are out there. And so we've gotta fight against that at the same time that we have to try to get them excited about the aesthetics of it. That's a, boy, that’s a lot of challenges.

And so my hope was with the project to introduce people to the sorts of things that you might see if you go out to any prairie anywhere, and to make those things interesting and more relatable, so that when people go out to a prairie for the first time, maybe they'll see something they recognize, and they'll see it positively, and then they'll say, “Oh, now I feel a little bit more comfortable here.” Because otherwise, I just feel like when somebody shows up to a prairie and they've never been to one before, it's just like showing up to somebody's house for a party where you don't think you know anybody. Nobody wants that. Nobody feels comfortable with that. And if that's what we expect people to go through to become fans of prairies, there's no way that's going to be successful.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. I really like that metaphor, that makes a lot of sense. Back in college, I was an anthropology student, and I did an ethnography project on city prairie restorations, and I hit on a lot of that fear of like, what's in the grass? Is it a criminal hiding there? You know?

CHRIS: Yeah, oh yeah. And legitimate fears, right? In the Chicago area, one of the things I really admire about the way they do their restorations is, they do great work on the prairies, but also, I love the big, wide paths that they have through them, so that people can walk along, walk through those prairies and feel like they've got a safe space. There's not like dangling plants hitting them as they walk by. All those little things really matter. And man, they've got a lot of people that go through those little prairies out in the Chicago suburbs. It's really amazing.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And if we think of them as not, I mean, I don’t want to say not natural, but as historically human-managed and created places, it makes sense we should make them places that people want to be and can see themselves in.

CHRIS: I think that's one of the mistakes we make sometimes as conservationists is that we we worry too much on the management side about things that the public doesn't care as much about. And those are important, but we have to be managing them. Especially when you're near populated areas, you've got to manage them in ways that people are going to see as valuable and interesting and something that is worth having around and visiting, because if we don't do that, then none of the other stuff we do matters. And so we've got to take full advantage of the fact that we've got prairies where people are. We got to get people out there, and that does change the way you think about managing them, I think. You gotta meet where they are.

CHRISTIAN: I have to jump off here for another call. But is there anything else that would be important for me to know, anything else we didn’t get to that you want to make sure you have a chance to say?

CHRIS: Oh I mean, we could talk forever about prairies. I think the last thing is really quickly, the idea of restoration in prairies, there's this really interesting conflict. I think the public expects prairie restoration to take us back in time. And I think people that are doing prairie restoration from an ecological standpoint are trying to take us into the future and trying to design prairies that are going to survive today's conditions and future conditions.

CHRISTIAN: Thanks so much, Chris, I appreciate it!

I’ve used Pocket religiously for years to save stories I want to come back to later—I had literally thousands of longform features saved there that I’d go back to and read in the app (or, in some cases—to be completely transparent—never go back to). Anyway, Mozilla shut down Pocket this spring as part of a campaign among all tech companies, as far as I can tell, to enshittify the internet as thoroughly as possible.

So I set off in search of a Pocket replacement. And I quickly found Notion, another project management/personal/work/life organization software. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a Notion fanboy, but it had a feature I liked—the ability to send links, via a browser extension or the share button on mobile, to a “Read later” list.

For a while, this was my only Notion use case. But then I started to play around with it more and realized how powerful it is. I was running into some frustrations with Trello at the same time. The main text field for a card has a pretty limited character length, so I was running out of room with bigger projects/longer stories. The only other field for information is the comments, which I was using for updates of all kinds—due dates, links I wanted to come back to, interviews I wanted to schedule, etc. Notion is a lot more open ended. I spent a few days playing around with it and found a system I liked. Here it is:

At first it looks pretty similar to what I was using to track my projects in Trello—a kanban board with individual cards for each story sorted into columns for initial ideas, stories I’m actively pitching, stories I’m in the reporting/writing process for, stories that I’m in the editing process for, and published/paid/finished projects. But under the hood, there’s a lot more going on.

Notion’s superpower is it’s database-based. It’s spreadsheets all the way down. So on that initial kanban board, there are all these filters and tags you can use to sort stories—by outlet, by date, by topic, etc. The databases that feed the tracker are on the left sidebar—Tasks and notes, Sources and Research. Everything from every story is in those spreadsheets, but each card only displays the information relevant to that story within it. So for example, this feature I’m working on for National Geographic, here’s the Task tracker:

So for any story, I can create a new task and move it around in these columns based on my progress on it. I can also add a due date to a given task and it appears in the Notion calendar on that date. And this is just a data visualization, basically. So you can choose to view this in other ways—as a timeline, a list, a chart, etc. And changing the view doesn’t change the data. It’s still not a perfect system—I’d prefer to just be able to check a checkbox and make something go away instead of changing its status to “Done,” because that column can fill up fast. But it works!

Then, there’s a notes database on the story page, within the card. Again, these could be displayed on a board, in a list, etc. This is the “Gallery” view. I use Word for most of my notes, outlining, etc., but having separate note entries here has been useful to keep track of things more informally. And these notes can contain documents, images, etc.

Then there’s the research database. It’s a version of the “Read later” list. Before, I was copying links into comments on my Trello cards and I’d have to scroll forever to find what I wanted. Now I have a searchable list of all the relevant studies/stories/etc in a spreadsheet.

And finally, the part I’m probably most excited about, the source list:

I’ve cut off most of the data here for privacy, but each entry has room for contact information, tags, relevant links (to interview transcripts, personal webpages), notes, etc. I’ve been meaning to keep an overall source list/rolodex in an organized way forever. Now I finally have one that I can continuously keep updated. If I want to find a scientist I interviewed for a story, I don’t have to go into the Trello card and scroll until I find their name among the chaos—I can just open up a single database and find them.

Oh, and every page in Notion supports comments. So I’ve been using that field for quick updates I want to keep top-of-mind, like where I’m at with pitching a piece.

I’m still feeling out exactly how I want to use Notion, but I’m pretty OK with leaving Trello behind at this point. This system has solved a lot of organizational problems I’ve been having—keeping track of tasks for individual stories, keeping an organized source rolodex, juggling calendars. If you’ve been looking for a piece of software to stay on top of freelance work, my new recommendation is Notion. And if you’re procrastinating on a project, completely changing your organizational system is a great way to do that (speaking for a friend?). Stay tuned for me to change my mind again in a few months…

Oh I almost forgot, here’s a link to the template I adapted for this story tracker. And there are lots of similar Notion templates out there—you can probably find one that works for you if you don’t like this one.

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too). As usual, a mix of meta stuff about science journalism and some just plain good long reads and features. You might recognize some of these from my trusty “Read later” list…

Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all. (Keerti Gopal, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Peter Aldhous, Clayton Aldern, & Amy Qin, Grist)

• This is a really impressive investigation by the team at Grist (and Inside Climate News and WBEZ) into Chicago’s lead pipe problem. The maps and interactives are amazing, and I also really love that the team published a separate story explaining their work—what a great way to build trust among readers.

Inside NASA’s Wild Space Mission to Defend Earth Against a Planet-Killing Asteroid (Hannah Richter, Popular Mechanics)

• My friend and former fellow NASA Goddard intern Hannah wrote this month’s print cover story for Popular Mechanics! It’s a cool deep dive into NASA’s DART asteroid redirection mission. I’d started as an intern just a month before DART collided with Dimorphos. It was really cool to relive that day through this piece.

The Lessons of a Glacier’s Collapse (Daniel A. Gross, The New Yorker)

• In May, a Swiss glacier collapsed and buried the village of Blatten. I’d followed the story closely and spoke with scientists right afterwards, because I’d been working on a story about similar giant landslides for months already. Interesting to read The New Yorker’s take!

How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer (WIRED)

• I have never gotten a pitch accepted by WIRED, but apparently it’s because I haven’t been using AI to fabricate story ideas. It’s nice to see this transparency about what happened, but also crazy that an AI pitch made it all the way to publication…

The Future Of Podcasting Is Here, And It Sucks (Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector)

• As a podcast producer, yeah. It sucks right now. The age of Serial is over, the age of Theo Vonn and Travis Kelce has begun." If you want to understand why, this is a great read by Normal Gossip’s producer. But basically, making a good audio story, like any good piece of journalism, takes an incredible amount of time and money. And it’s hard to make that money back through advertising. Throwing a celebrity into a studio to talk for two hours, barely editing anything and publishing the conversation is a much easier, safer bet. And that’s ruining this industry. “Pivot to video,” “personality-driven,” “chat show…” all words that make me cringe.

You Can’t Hook Readers If You Don’t Trust Their Intelligence (Carmine Starnino, The Walrus)

• The Walrus is a Canadian non-profit magazine that publishes a lot of great journalism and commentary. This piece really resonated with me. I came to journalism from anthropology, which doesn’t have the same limits in writing on structure and format. It’s freeing to think of writing longform stories that don’t need a nut graf that gives everything away at the top and lets readers know what they’re in for. If you hook them, they should be willing to stick along and figure things out along the way, to make up their own minds about what you’re trying to tell them!

Celebrity profiles are a whole genre in journalism—you read them in j-school classes. Great writers can capture the essence of their subject from a few hours spent together through telling details. As a science reporter, I’ve never been that interested in profiles. I like dropping into a new field and slowly coming to understand the breadth of research within it, talking to dozens of researchers to put together a feature. But sometimes, one person’s story is just so compelling that it’s the perfect way in to a complicated story for a general audience. And a central character really helps structure a good narrative

So that’s the idea with this piece I’m writing (or should be writing). I’ve spent more than 10 days in the field before—most recently in Chile where I followed a team of researchers studying cold-water corals. But I’ve never followed one person for nearly this long. I was a little nervous going in. My subject was an eccentric Alaskan freelance geologist and adventurer named Hig. Over the next week or so, we spent just about every waking moment together—and the experience complicated my understanding of the relationship between journalist and source.

Hig had been giving a talk at a lodge in Girdwood when I picked him up with my rental car—he lives off the road system and doesn’t have one of his own in mainland Alaska. He walked out wearing two battered, dirty backpacking packs containing everything he’d need for the week, from a tent and deflated pack raft to a laptop and external hard drives to a rock drill and caulk gun for instrument installations.

You really get a sense for a person’s personality fast on a road trip, and we spent close to 24 hours driving across Alaska in those 10 days. I quickly learned Hig is pretty much indefatigable—he can talk and bushwhack essentially forever without running of of energy. Trying to be judicious with my audio recorder’s storage (and my patience for reviewing files in the coming weeks), I filled three of those little Field Notes pocket-sized notebooks with observations about the science, yes, but also about Hig as a person—his motivations, his childhood, how he handles encounters with bears, his frugality (darning ripped shoes back together with dental floss on the floor in a dingy hotel room), his trouble with authority.

At the beginning, I struggled to figure out my role in the situations we walked into as I followed Hig on his high-intensity summer fieldwork in Alaska—from Homer to Denali to Whittier to Glacier View. He’s this self proclaimed bad-news-bearing natural disaster Jehovah’s Witness—he studies deep-seated slow-moving landslides and spends most of his time walking into communities to tell them they face a potentially deadly hazard they weren’t previously aware of. He’s doing this on his own as the government (with limited funding and staffing) lags behind the scale of the problem. It can get contentious. And it’s a weird thing to always have a reporter trailing along behind you for.

We met the mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough early on at a harbor working on his fishing boat. Hig went into his spiel, explaining some of the most important landslide science and showing the mayor one of his homemade radar instruments for monitoring. Hig did most of the talking and the mayor asked questions. It was less a reporter-led interview and more of a conversation I was a fly on the wall for. At one point, I butted in to ask the mayor if he saw a future in which the borough would purchase a bunch of instruments to monitor the landslides that threaten his constituents on their own, in the absence of state or federal support. He laughed and said, “Are you a reporter or his sidekick?”

It was a joke and I got a well-reasoned answer from him, but it made me check myself—how was I coming off? How was I affecting the work and conversations I was here to follow and objectively report on? And what was Hig’s role? Independent scientist? Salesman? I think we found the balance in the coming days—sometimes I more or less observed Hig in action; other times, I sat down with scientists and community members for what were more clearly traditional interviews.

Natural hazards can be a sensitive issue. In one community where Hig’s been slowly working on building trust, there’s been fiery debate over whether to allow research on landslides at all, over concerns about insurance rates and property values. There’s a historic Christian summer camp at risk there, and Hig was at first hesitant to introduce me to its director via email. Ultimately, he had me contact the director without using his name—things had gotten volatile enough he wasn’t sure if it would help or hurt his work to be associated with me. It all worked out. At the last minute the director offered a sit-down interview and was really lovely. Hig and I came together—I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t know him or anything, which would have felt dishonest. But the approach was delicate over several months and I wasn’t sure which way it would go until pretty late.

Another place I really wanted to get to was a private lodge on National Park Service land where a landslide had generated a tsunami a year before that swept under cabins. It would have been great for the story, but Hig ultimately wasn’t comfortable with us going there together or passing the lodge’s contact information along. He had a good relationship with the owners, but they didn’t want their lodge featured in a national magazine in this context. They were worried about losing guests. I could have forced the issue—gone on my own, since it’s on public land, and talked to lodge guests, given the owner an opportunity to talk to me on the record or not. But I didn’t want to risk my relationship with Hig. And the story will work without it.

Anyway, now I’m deep in interview recordings and notes trying to figure out how to turn 10 days of 24/7 Hig exposure into a profile that captures him as a character and explains this crazy geological phenomenon threatening Alaskans and people across the world in regions where icy things are warming up really fast. More soon about how that’s going, behind the scenes. In the meantime, any questions about what it’s like to write a feature for Nat Geo right now? I’ll try to answer them.

Reading list

What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too). As usual, a mix of meta stuff about science journalism and some just plain good long reads and features:

Why newsrooms must rethink science journalism before the next crisis (Subhra Priyadarshini, Nature India)

• I firmly believe that every story is a science story—or at least, could benefit from a science journalism approach. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, AI. Generalist reporters just can’t be expected to cover the complexities of these topics well (the process, the nuances beyond press releases and breakthroughs), on top of everything else they do. Science journalism should be treated as a necessity, instead of a luxury. Preach!

The First Soda in Space: When NASA Got Caught Up in the Cola Wars (Joseph Dragovich, The New York Times)

• In the 1980s, the Cola Wars raged between Coke and Pepsi. This is a story of a Reagan-era cutthroat industry battle to get the first cola to space, by any means necessary. A tale of shaving cream bottles and “wet burps.” I had no idea Carter was a Coke guy and Reagan was a Pepsi guy. But that feels right.

Stop the Presses? Does Print Have More of a Future in Media Than We Think? (Eric Rynston-Lobel, Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative)

• In grad school I did some research for the annual Local news Initiative report on news deserts at Northwestern Medill. I still follow the site, and this piece caught my eye recently—local journalism’s turn back to print. Apparently, some people still want a physical copy. I mean, even The Onion is back to print.

Does Violence at a Remote Antarctica Station Spell Doom for Mars Missions? (Tereza Pultarova, Supercluster)

• If you haven’t read it before, Supercluster is an outlet that covers space and the space industry. They follow launches closely—there’s always a countdown to the next interesting one at the top of the page. But this piece is different. It digs into an ever-present problem in Antarctic research bases, sexual assault and harassment, and the implications of that problem for long-term future space travel. There’s a rich world of parallels between Antarctica and space—it’s one of my favorite rabbit holes. This is a dark one, but also a topic I’ve followed closely (and written about).

How Rugby and Improv Turned Lulu Miller Into One of Radio’s Best Storytellers (Madison Feller, Elle)

• I have always loved Radiolab—the way they tell these science stories that are really stories about people and what makes us human, the intricate sound design, etc. This is a nice profile of one of the show’s hosts, Lulu Miller, and how she got there (I am so jealous it was early enough that she just asked them if she could help and they said yes).

The paper bag containing 15 pounds of flash-frozen and vacuum-packed coho and sockeye salmon filets was passed to me in the last row of the Fred Meyer parking lot in Anchorage, Alaska, five hours before my flight home to Chicago. For the next 27 hours, they took over my life.

After 10 days of reporting across the state—long drives, mountain bushwhacks, helicopter flights, boat rides and little sleep—for a National Geographic feature story about landslides (more in line with the focus of this newsletter and which I promise to get back to that in a future edition), I met a friend for a beer. An avid fisherman at the height of salmon season, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—free fish.

Today, if you’ll indulge me, their long, upstream migration home—which tested my problem-solving skills on 36 hours without sleep (and loaded with near-lethal doses of Dramamine to ward off seasickness the day before) and reunited two old friends.

Part 1: An American Airlines-branded cardboard box

Sunday, July 20, 3:59 p.m. (15 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

Frozen fish are not known to remain frozen on their own for very long. So I left the paper bag in the back seat of my rental Kia sedan and rushed into Fred Meyer, where I secured a 26-liter styrofoam cooler, a roll of packing tape and 2.5 pounds of powdered dry ice (Note: Do not attempt to “self serve” dry ice at the Anchorage Fred Meyer—you will be reprimanded). I then reconsidered at the car and returned to purchase 2.5 additional pounds of powdered dry ice, near the American Airlines legal limit of 5.5 pounds. The cashier remembered and re-entered my birthday, May 10—the same as his brother’s. “How often has that fallen on Mother’s Day?” he asked. A few times.

With 15 pounds of salmon and 5 pounds of dry ice secured in my new styrofoam cooler, I spent a few hours not thinking about the fish at all, happily working on my story in a delightful coffee shop in Spenard serenaded by a quartet of very old traditional Irish musicians. That would soon change.

Sunday, July 20, 7:44 p.m. (4 hours out of the freezer in Alaska)

I realized my mistake in line for baggage drop off at the American Airlines kiosk at Ted Stevens International Airport. In the line next to me stood a man in a flannel shirt and baseball cap towing a luggage cart stacked high with a half dozen 50-pound styrofoam-lined cardboard boxes of frozen fish, specially designed for shipping your Alaska catch home via checked luggage. The attendant took one look at my styrofoam cooler and shook her head—too big to carry on and against the rules to check without a cardboard cover. I should have purchased a fish box from Fred Meyer, she told me. Would have been great to know while I was at Fred Meyer.

She scampered off and returned with a small, American Airlines-branded cardboard box. On the luggage scale we transferred filet after filet into the box, poured in the dry ice and taped it up. I paid, she radioed ahead about “hazardous cargo” and my makeshift fish box was off down the conveyor belt, surrounded by much bigger, more official boxes. I gifted my brand-new styrofoam cooler to American Airlines and headed to my gate.

Part 2: Friends are friends, not fish. But friends do like fish, (and food).

Monday, July 21, 7:38 a.m. (15 hours, 54 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

It had occurred to me before I even boarded my 6.5-hour flight to Chicago that a cardboard box containing 15 pounds of salmon filets and less than 5 pounds of powdered dry ice (it had almost 6 hours to sublimate before we both got on the plane) would not remain frozen forever. I spent my time waiting for takeoff Googling dry ice sublimation rates and the insulating properties of cardboard and proper fish shipping techniques and aircraft hold temperatures. As soon as we deplaned in Chicago, very aware of the early morning 80-degree outdoor temperatures and high humidity, I asked a gate agent if I could access my checked bag. She said probably not, but to ask at baggage claim.

So, with hours before my second flight, I headed out through security to baggage claim and explained my extenuating circumstances to the attendant there, who flagged my box just in time. I yanked it off the conveyor belt and sliced it open with my house key on the tile floor—the dry ice was completely gone, but the filets were still frozen. Unfortunately, my fish and I were facing down a long layover.

You’re probably thinking, “OK, what now, smart guy?” Well, with my defrosting fish beside me in an increasingly damp cardboard box, I called up every grocery store in Rosemont and Arlington Heights until I found a Meijer that assured me it carried both dry ice and coolers. Then I snagged an Uber and rode four miles through standstill traffic. Due to a language barrier, I left him with what must have been a very confusing understanding that I was here in the Chicago suburbs on vacation from Alaska and would be staying at the Meijer in Rolling Meadows.

Monday, July 21, 9:10 a.m. (17 hours, 26 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

With a large duffel bag on my back, backpack on my chest and soggy cardboard box in my arms, I waddled through Meijer to the Penguin dry ice cooler and purchased an 8-pound slab of the stuff—the only size it came in. Crouching on the floor outside the self checkout, I repacked my American Airlines box with the fresh ice and re-taped. Then, tossing my precious cargo in a shopping cart, headed to the outdoor goods section and bought a rolling (carry-on size) blue Igloo cooler.

With the free fish safely (still frozen) packed into my new cooler, tags still attached, I sat down to rest on a bench in the Meijer entryway and added up my salmon-related expenses so far: $15 styrofoam cooler, $25 of powdered dry ice (sublimated), $40 bag check fee, $35 Uber, $30 of solid dry ice (new), $45 Igloo cooler. No such thing as a free fish, eh? An echoey version of “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac started over the Meijer store speakers. I decided to make a call.

Monday, July 21, 10:24 a.m. (18 hours, 40 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

Christian Thorsberg—a friend from grad school, environmental journalist, photographer and (fatefully), freshly returned to the Chicago suburbs after a year working for the USGS in Alaska, showed up 20 minutes later and drove me to his parents’ house where we unloaded my cooler into their freezer and spent a delightful afternoon catching up and co-working at a cafe. After breaking up my dry ice slab into chunks (to stay under the 5.5-pound legal American Airlines limit) on the driveway with garden tools, I left him with a few filets and he drove me back to O’Hare to catch my final flight.

At this point, I think, I’d experienced the full complexity of the gift, in Mauss’ eyes. I had received my fish, with all the obligations and stresses and hidden costs. Through it, social bonds had been reinforced. And I had passed it on, continuing the chain of exchange in which, Mauss writes, “One can study the whole of human behaviour, and social life in its entirety.” I can definitely say if the fish survived frozen, I’d certainly value each filet more than ever before. At this point, they were my traveling companions. But this, I’m afraid, is not the end of the story.

An unprecedented occurrence in the O’Hare International Airport Terminal 3 TSA PreCheck line

Monday, July 21, 3:14 p.m. (23 hours, 30 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska. But, to be fair, with a few hours in the Thorsberg family freezer)

I waited in a very long line at the “special help” American Airlines desk for an attendant who was very confused by my request to check or carry on (preferably) an Igloo cooler of frozen fish and dry ice. I informed him of the American Airlines policy, which he confirmed after 10 minutes of computer searching. With my duffel bag checked and cooler as my carry on, I rolled into the TSA PreCheck line and set the fish up on the X-Ray belt. My heart sank as I watched the Igloo divert onto the belt for problematic items. Suffice to say, the fish were suspish. My duffel had done the same earlier—I’d picked up a very nice piece of anthracite atop a landslide that also required special attention. Of course, I was also pulled aside for a random pat down.

So, with 20 minutes before boarding, I found myself standing next to a stainless steel table while a man in blue latex gloves gingerly removed each frozen filet from my cooler, emanating vapor. He asked his supervisor about the TSA policy on dry ice. He’d never seen it before. She told him no one had ever attempted to take dry ice in a carry-on bag before and that it certainly wasn’t allowed. I told her that, per TSA policy, it actually was allowed. And that per American Airlines policy, the limit was 5.5 pounds. She didn’t like that, but the TSA guy asked Google AI on his iPhone if dry ice was allowed in carry-on baggage and the AI confirmed it was.

This did not assuage the supervisor’s concerns—she told me I’d have to go back out through security and double check with American Airlines on their policy. I told her I had, in fact, done that. TSA guy and I waited for ten minutes while the supervisor went out to check herself. In the meantime, we chatted about fishing (I do not fish). He was impressed with both my salmon and my cooler. (“Where did you get that Igloo?” “At the Meijer.” “In Rolling Meadows?” “Yeah.” “No way, that’s my Meijer too. I need to get one of those.”). Sympathetic, he radioed to his supervisor to ask if he could let me go. She said absolutely not—American Airlines had told her (she alleged) that dry ice was strictly prohibited.

She then returned to tell me I’d need to go back out through security and check the cooler. I told her I’d already checked another bag for $40 and really would not like to also check the cooler, and plus I’d miss my flight. She told me I could file a complaint. I asked if the dry ice was the only problem. She said yes. I looked at them both, opened the cooler, pulled out the dry ice slab, walked it to the TSA garbage can, dropped it in and rolled the cooler away, leaving the can billowing water vapor behind me.

Return to the home stream

Monday, July 21, 6:11 p.m. (26 hours, 27 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

I felt confident about my new Igloo cooler’s ability to keep my salmon filets frozen for an hour-long connecting flight. However, that flight was delayed as soon as I reached the gate—the flight crew was MIA. I spent the next two hours asking (embarrassingly, on two separate occasions) the nearby Starbucks for Venti cups of ice, two at a time, to pour over my frozen filets in the cooler. Then, after all that, they gate checked the thing—I frantically wrapped it up with packing tape and sent it down the conveyor belt onto the 95-degree tarmac, hoping for the best.

The cooler, a little worse for wear, was of course the very last bag to emerge on the baggage claim an hour later on the ground. Resisting the urge to open Shroedinger’s salmon cooler—allowing its contents to remain simultaneously horrendously thawed and pristinely frozen in my imagination—I drove home, with the air conditioning on full blast.

Monday, July 21, 7:24 p.m. (27 hours, 40 minutes out of the freezer in Alaska)

This is just to say

the salmon

that were in the cooler

and which

you were probably

worried about

are now safely

in the icebox

Forgive me

this newsletter will return to its regular, on-topic programming next time