Jason Daley

Welcome to my long overdue website. My most recent and popular clips and some random thoughts can be found in the posts below. To view specific clips such as Environment or Humor, please click on the Categories bar to the right. There are older articles on the page titled Archive Clips and a sampling of my piss-poor photography skills on the Selected Photos page. Enjoy, and let me know if you find any misspellings, broken links, or have suggestions on improving this site.

For someone who prefers nerdly activities like bird watching, plant ID, and canoeing, it’s baffling that most of my biggest assignments over the last five years have involved beer, combustion engines, and sensitive ecosystems. The trend continues in my article on the  Arctic Man Ski and Sno-Go Classic for Skiing Magazine. About one hour of the five-day Alaskan bacchanal involves skiing. The rest involve high-octane unleaded and drunk chicks. Not that I’m complaining…

Popular Science recently published my third installment of the Worst Jobs in Science. I’m not crazy about the gallery format they use on the website (looks better in print), but the illustrations are great. The word count on this piece shrinks every year. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to say about each of these jobs, and the “gross” elements we harp on are often the least interesting bits.

This is my second year doing the Science Confirms the Obvious package for Popular Science, and this time around I was careful to really explain why these seemingly silly studies are being done. Sadly, there’s never enough words in these packages to do the research justice, but I’m consistently amazed at how complex what we think of as no-brainers, like giving water to farm ducks, can be. Sure there are research projects that are just, dumb, but I think all of the studies covered in this piece have more than justified themselves, even if the headlines describing them haven’t.

My article How I Lost 5,400 Pounds While Packing for the Trip of Lifetime recently won a Lowell Thomas award for environmental travel writing.

By far my favorite gig as a freelancer was writing Outside’s Wild File Q&A column. Sadly, assignments involving critters and in-depth research are few and far between these days. So I relished the chance to track down animal tidbits for MSN Travel in the UK for an online slideshow called Travel’s Deadliest Wildlife. I’m always concerned about sensationalizing the dangers animals pose to humans since many of those fears are totally irrational. That’s why I took great pains to track down critters that really do pose a threat, though most of them will leave you alone if you don’t step on them or poke them with a cricket bat. I’ve looked into this topic before, and it’s amazing that even in this information age we still can’t get a good handle on how many people are killed each year by snakes or scorpions or rabid dogs. I tracked down the best numbers available, but even the researchers will admit they’re only guesses.

As for the slide of the “elk,” there’s some confusion. What we call moose in North America are called elk in Europe. What we call elk are called… I have no idea what they call them in Europe. In any case, some cross-continental guessing led to an incorrect photo. Apologies to Bullwinkle.