Raised in Brooklyn. Collected books about animals and distant places. Weekends hiking upstate New York, a summer building trails in the Rockies. Gap year teaching skiing in Crested Butte, Colorado. Long hair phase. Studied at Brown. A semester in Ecuador. An international relations degree. Cared for endangered gibbons in Southern California. Moved to San Francisco during the first dot-com boom. Worked in PR. Never got any stock options. Backpacked across Asia for a year. Invented a dessert sushi in Laos, now immortalized in Lonely Planet. Professional journalism began. Embedded with anti-immigration vigilantes on Mexican border and Afghanistan-bound Marines in Nevada mountains. Covered the 2008 U.S. election from Obama's Kenyan family’s home. Lived for a month on world's remotest inhabited island, and a month aboard a Norwegian research vessel drifting in Arctic sea ice. Reported and photographed stories from all seven continents for The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Disability Rights Fund, and WWF. Joined faculty of the School of the New York Times. Staying curious.