I am an observer, a documentarian, and a cultural translator. I translate specialized information to general audiences, and I translate innovative ideas across different fields and social backgrounds. And so, my work appears regularly in public debate, including in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, NPR, MSNBC, and CNN.
My present book-in-progress is a look into an important, understudied historical figure, and a portrait of a shifting America, to be published by Pantheon Books, Penguin-Random House.
Currently, I am the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in Nonfiction Literature at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard University. In 2023, I taught at Princeton University, as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies.
My first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, won an Editor’s Choice Award from The American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and white nationalism in contemporary US life. My work looking closely at changing worlds has been granted research support from Civitella, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, the Robert Silvers Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Columbia University Law School, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
My community involvement is to serve a few Boards of Trustees: Art Omi, the renowned arts center; New_Publics, the pro-democracy technology venture; and the Authors Guild, the national union of writers that has been protecting authors’ rights and free speech since 1912.