Writing

For general audiences, I write about police, cities, labor, and social movements, in both historical and contemporary contexts. I’ve written about how jails became filled with poor and sick people, why white suburbanites became obsessed with crime, and what a Super Bowl ad can teach us about the future of Detroit.

In the Rubble: Picturing L.A.’s Housing Crisis, in Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California, eds. Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzmán and Samine Joudat (Angel City Press, 2024).

The Poverty of Homeownership [review of Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial and Andrew Kahrl’s The Black Tax], Public Books, Dec. 4, 2024.
What Really Makes Cities Global? [review of Sean T. Dempsey’s City of Dignity], Public Books, Aug. 8, 2023.
The ‘Here’ of Magical Thinking: Palo Alto, by Malcolm Harris, Protean Magazine, Mar. 1, 2023.
The Cruel Theater of Carceral Capitalism: On Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives: How Rikers Took New York City Hostage, The Metropole, Nov. 23, 2022,
The Politics of Concrete, Protean Magazine, July 21, 2022.
Broken Homes of the Drug War, Protean Magazine, Feb. 25, 2022.
A City’s History and Racial Capitalism [review of Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America], Against the Current, Jan./Feb. 2022.
The Ballot or the Brick: On Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire and Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting, Monthly Review Online, Aug. 10, 2021.
Abolishing the Suburbs: On Kyle Riismandel’s Neighborhood of Fear, LA Review of Books, Apr. 13, 2021.
Reading Mike Davis in Toronto: Police Violence and the Global City [on the 30th anniversary of City of Quartz], LA Review of Books, Nov. 22, 2020.
The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops [review of Philip Conklin and Mark Jay’s A People’s History of Detroit], Public Books, Nov. 3, 2020.
What Was the Rust Belt? On Brett Story’s Prison Land and Rebecca J. Kinney’s Beautiful Wasteland, Cleveland Review of Books, Sept. 25, 2019.