Portfolio

Excerpts of long-form features.

Signals and Power

Gifford City is a ghost town. There’s dust on the streets and the buildings are empty. Cars have been parked in the same spots for years. A few townspeople loiter perpetually in front of the train station. A woman in pink has an arm raised in greeting, but the friend she greets doesn’t wave back. It’s desolate. It’s bereft. But it’s not dilapidated. There are no windows broken by looters, no graffiti, no litter. In nearby Berkmannville, Middle Heights, and Green River, it’s the same. Lumber yards, paper plants, produce distributors, cola factories—all empty. Lights come on periodically, but no one is seen coming or going from the buildings. Cars wait patiently at railroad crossings, but forget the effort of continuing their journeys after each passing train. At the far end of a bridge, a man in a long white robe holds a sign: “The end of the world is here!” Then an annoyed voice cuts into the scenery, “What the hell is going on with this thing?” and a hand reaches down from the sky to stroke an orange hopper car smoothly back onto the train track. (© 2007, full article: 4200 words)

Roadrunner to Reach Top Speeds

Imagine having to wait by your computer for ten straight years to get the answer to a single question. Now imagine you can do it in a week, but that the only computer on Earth fast enough to devour the data has the square footage of your high school gym. Think you’re back in the Fifties at the dawn of the supercomputing age? Think again. It’s 2007, the computer is named Roadrunner, and the data waiting to be crunched includes a mathematical model of a global HIV vaccine. (© 2007, full article: 700 words) Top

Like Another Umbilical Cord

Johanna Swift Hart begins catching babies this week. A Certified Nurse-Midwife, she has worked for the last few years in both a community health center and a women’s prison. In both those settings she did basic reproductive health—“Pap and pills” she calls it—but the pregnant women always delivered off-site. Today she joins thirteen other nurse-midwives at Mount Auburn Hospital, in a women’s center so seamlessly integrated into the hospital that many parents-to-be never notice that they haven’t spoken to an obstetrician once during pregnancy or labor. So why do expectant mothers in an online discussion board still ask of midwifery, “Is it in any way dangerous?!?”       (© 2007, full article: 4000 words) Top

From Flywheels to Flyleaves

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is old as American cities go, and the walk along Massachusetts Avenue has no shortage of Victorian homes clad in historically accurate paint colors and architectural details. However there’s only one that, at any given time, houses a luxury car like the 1995 Mercedes-Benz E-class—fully disassembled in a workshop that has more in common with a surgical unit than your local garage—and surrounded by the twitter of clicking cameras. If the car world were Hollywood, then this would be Angelina and her paparazzi. Welcome to Bentley Publishers, creators of high-end car manuals. (© 2007) Top

Childhood Relocation and its Effect on Identity and Intimacy

Moving seems to be a particularly American phenomenon. Since the early 1980s, the United States has had the second highest rate of relocation of six industrialized nations, and for many the very notion of America is built on a romanticized notion of movement and expansion.

Each year, approximately seventeen percent of American children between the ages of one and eighteen move homes. Over the course of a three-year period, it jumps to between forty and fifty-five percent for three- to nine-year-olds. And studies show that the average student has relocated 4.8 times. Regardless of whether the change is an overall positive or negative experience, the very process of moving is a stressful event. (© 2004, full paper: 5000 words) Top

© Serious Curious, 2009