Looking back, looking forward

Yeah, a "year in review" post is a little cliché, but hey, it's December 31

What to say about 2025. Maybe the less the better? For me, personally and professionally, it was a stressful one, but punctuated by some pretty high highs. I got married in May, my wife graduated from medical school and started her residency, we bought a house together—not in a place either of us really wanted to be, geographically, but it’ll be a nice place to weather the next few years.

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.

We’re on other platforms (Spotify is new for us), but we still made the Spotify charts this year—in a podcast landscape dominated by chat shows and celebrities.

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.

What a cool poster, eh?

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!).

Smithsonian also republished this story, which was cool.

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?