The COVID Tracking Project
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-founded and co-lead the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which compiles, annotates, and publishes high-quality data about the outbreak.
Containers, a podcast
I made an 8-part podcast called CONTAINERS in spring 2017. Here's some background on the podcast.
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
A synthesis of the ways that Facebook destabilized the information ecosystem.
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 12, 2017
on
THE ATLANTIC
In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.
Tecate by Air
I wrote this after a couple of weeks hanging around the San Diego-Tijuana border, which just happens to be where my father crossed into the United States in the early 1960s.
PUBLISHED October 20, 2016 on
FUSION
It was not until our pilot grabbed the Cessna 172 by the propeller and pulled it to the gas pump at the tiny airfield that I started to get nervous about flying low along the US-Mexico border wall.
American Aqueduct
This is probably the best feature I've ever written. It's about the saga of water in California.
PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 24, 2014
on THE ATLANTIC
Hood, California, is a farming town of 200 souls, crammed up against a levee that protects it from the Sacramento River.
Powering the Dream
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology was my first book. It tried to trace both the tech and culture of renewable energy through time.
You can buy the book here.
Housing and Racism
For the past couple years, I've been looking into various aspects of racism in the nation's housing systems, past, present, and future. This article covers some of that work, especially around the infrastructure of home appraisal.
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 28, 2016
Real Future TV
In 2015 and 2016, I co-executive produced and co-hosted the first season of Real Future on Fusion. The television show focused on people using technology in their lives, and it is fun and smart and weird. The cast of characters is really, really unusual for a tech thing.
How Google Builds Its Maps
This story dug deep into how Google makes its maps, from the machine vision to the human labor. Maps, in turn, are key to one of my recent fascinations: automation in its many guises.
PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places.
Stories
Alexis Madrigal is a journalist. He's interested in the ways that technology and capitalism warp the social and physical environments where people work and live. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and working on a book about the port and city of Oakland.