And who was I? A reporter. Why was I traveling? To look, to walk around, to ask, to listen,to sniff, to think, to write.
–The Soccer War , 1969
M. R. O’Connor is a journalist who writes about the politics and ethics of science, technology and conservation. She contributes to The New Yorker and her reporting has appeared in outlets such as National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Nautilus. Her story “Inside the Fight Against a Los Angeles Inferno” was selected for the 2026 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
O’Connor regularly embeds with wildland firefighters and prescribed fire crews to write about the people and communities who work and live with fire. Since 2021, she has joined crews in places such as Nebraska’s Loess Hills, California’s Klamath Mountains, Southwestern ponderosa pine forests, and Australia’s eastern grasslands and tropics. Her book Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World (September 2023, Bold Type Books) is an exploration of fire ecology, anthropology, and future of fire.
In 2008/2009, O’Connor was a reporter for The Sunday Times, an English-language newspaper in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her investigative reporting on topics like disappearances in Sri Lanka’s civil war, global agriculture trade in Haiti, and American development enterprises in Afghanistan have been funded by institutions such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Phillips Foundation, and The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. For a long time, she made her bread and butter as a stringer covering crime, courts, and breaking news in New York City for publications such as The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, and covered the criminal justice beat for the online investigative site The New York World.
Her first book, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) and was one of Library Journal and Amazon’s Best Books of The Year. Her second book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) is tour of navigation traditions, neuroscience, and the diversity of human relationships to space, time and memory. Its writing was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan’s Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, & Economics.
She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a 2016/17 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in the Rockaways, New York with her partner, the screenwriter Bryan Parker, and their three sons.
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