I’m a neuroscientist and writer. My first book, Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World (Riverhead, 2024), was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Guardian, and was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Zócalo Book Prize. My essays appear in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Wired, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal.

Before neuroscience, I studied physics at MIT, worked as an itinerant astronomer for several years, and served in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan, teaching English. I went on to a PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley, postdoctoral work in computational neuroscience at University College London and the University of Basel, and research at Google DeepMind—studying how brains, biological and artificial, make sense of the world.