I was born in New York, raised in Washington, DC, and before settling in Brooklyn, where I currently live with my husband and three children, spent years in California, Europe, and South America. I hold a masters in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in medical anthropology. I spent a long time believing I wanted to be an academic, before giving myself over to the human stories I most want to tell.

Most recently, I’ve been reporting from the Peruvian Amazon for season one of my podcast, Seeking, on psychedelics and the nature of healing. Once upon a time, I was the publisher and executive director of Guernica Magazine. My writing, spanning public health, cultural criticism, and utopias has been published in Nature, the Financial Times, Aeon, the Guardian, Guernica,  Psychology Today, and Outside among other outlets. The Pleasure Gap, a product of five years of research and reporting, makes the case that our most intimate feelings are mediated by politics and power.

These days you can find me in the archives at UCLA, digging through the papers of Anaïs Nin. My new biography of her life and legacy is forthcoming from Crown.