Links to some pieces I've published

Physics 18, 125: June 26, 2025. In which I venture to the tiny island of Helgoland, where quantum mechanics arguably began, to find out what today’s top experts make of the theory’s successes and mysteries.

WSJ: May 20, 2024. How quantum computers have recently become powerful enough to give some researchers hope that they will soon prove useful for solving practical problems.

WSJ: January 20, 2024. How a merry band of retail investors is applying new, easy-to-use online tools to trade like highly quantitative hedge funds.

WSJ: August 21, 2023. While AI enthusiasm is driving a tech stock rally, exchange-traded funds that use AI to make trading decisions are lagging behind.

WSJ: January 21, 2023. Why, after a multi-year slump, the offshore oil drilling has come roaring back.

WSJ: December 22, 2022. Why oil traders are warily watching what computer-driven trading firms are doing, despite the latter’s mixed success.

Nautilus: February 23, 2022. In which a reporter embeds himself in the research group of a physicist to try and understand his radical approach to quantum theory and emerges with a new outlook on life.

The New York Times Magazine: June 28, 2020. How one physicist has rebelled against the orthodox view that quantum mechanics is an ultimate theory of nature and is driving experiments that could prove him right (or wrong.)

Scientific American: October, 2019. How a group of physicists used a computer algorithm to discover a new compound that superconducts at room temperature when under extremely high pressures and what that might mean for the quest to find a room-temperature superconductor that works in more ordinary conditions.

New Scientist: July 14, 2018. How a new experimental result has raised some physicists’ hopes of proving that quantum mechanics is only an approximation to a better (and less paradoxical) theory.

Nautilus. Issue 24: Error. A profile of Peter Woit, a Columbia mathematician who is a prominent critic of string theory.

Quanta: September 26, 2017. Why one physicist has proposed building a big, particle-detecting “barn” in the grass over the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva and why other scientists are taking the idea seriously.

Nautilus. Issue 43: Heroes. In which an ambitious young man goes to graduate school dreaming of solving one of the great outstanding problems of physics and has his expectations dramatically adjusted.

Nautilus. Issue 37: Currents. How regulators are relying on network science to help prevent another financial crash and why experts disagree about whether their approach makes sense.

Nautilus. Issue 31: Stress. In which a bank’s derivatives trader takes on most of the financial risk of Mexico’s oil exports just before the 2008-09 financial crisis causes the oil market to crash and what he learned from the experience.

The Marshall Project: Life Inside. In which a reporter spends a night responding to calls with an NYPD sergeant in the Bronx, sees how he trains a new recruit and gets the sergeant’s take on recent reforms of practices such as “stop and frisk.”