How I See It

I’ve been a journalist for 25 years. I cover technology, money, beauty, human weirdness, and the complicated systems that keep society going.

I’m the son of two wonderfully unusual people. My Mom is a nurse-turned-public health-academic who taught me to be deeply distrustful of for-profit systems posing as civic institutions, of the influence of money in general, and of the role that gender inevitably plays in power and politics. My Dad is a historian of slavery and colonialism who spent his formative years in India, and as a result returned to the US utterly bewildered by the casual racism built into everything he encountered here. He taught me to recognize the deep history of racism and inequality and my ancestors’ place in it, and, as a stay-at-home father, he inadvertently programmed me to assume that a man’s proudest roles are as a cook, confidante, and caregiver. It was an oddball upbringing, one I’m deeply grateful for, and their emphasis on right action and honest speech made journalism a pretty obvious choice for me.

I think of my career as having two broad phases (this one is its third).

The first was a career in print journalism. It began in 1997, when I was newly arrived in San Francisco and got a job as the first reporter at The Industry Standard, a magazine created to cover the way the Internet was going to revolutionize the business world. At that time there were ads all over San Francisco that offered business courses with the tag line “Do well while doing good,” and I tried to think of the startup founders I met in that way — morally upright but strategically ruthless entrepreneurs who were going to improve the world by creating profitable businesses. But I was naturally allergic to most of the sentiments I bumped into, and I couldn’t help but return again and again to the people that the Internet boom was leaving out. I managed to get a couple of stories into the magazine about the perfectly qualified Black founders who couldn’t seem to score funding even as their white counterparts pulled in enormous venture rounds, but I recognized quickly that a business audience — those who follow the ups and downs of business so they can understand how to participate in it — wouldn’t necessarily care about the larger issues of inequality to which I was drawn, and within a year I departed the magazine for a big depressive crash and a year of surfing and credit card debt.

I then spent several years working at design magazines like Architecture, ReadyMade, and Metropolis, which were essentially paid crash courses in systems and design thinking. Writing and editing for these publications taught me the enormous editorial value of using a specific beat as a sort of clarifying prism for pointing light at broader topics. At Architecture, for instance, I wrote about how American schools and American prisons are so often designed by the same firms, about the simple economic reason that every suburb looks the same (one firm publishes the codes, and everyone buys from that firm), and about the way September 11th transformed public architecture from an emphasis on openness to one full of paranoia and hidden protection.

Eventually I scored a great job, as the second-in-command and eventually as editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine. It was a tremendous experience