About me

I’m an editor, writer, and San Franciscan living in extended exile in the East Bay.

Currently, I edit coverage of research at Stanford’s business school and am the editor of Stanford Business magazine. Previously, I was a deputy editor at Mother Jones, where I held several editorial roles over more than 15 years.

A few greatest hits: I edited Shane Bauer’s National Magazine Award-winning account of working in a private prison and was part of the team nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy for the accompanying multimedia package. I wrote the first in-depth profile of shock jock Michael Savage and later uncovered emails documenting his chaotic stint on the board of San Francisco’s Presidio. I investigated a forgotten murder case involving the National Rifle Association’s top lawyer.

My work has received awards and other recognition. My writing and reporting have been published by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Atlas Obscura, Salon, Frontline/World, California, the East Bay Express, Meatpaper, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My radio stories have aired on KQED’s The California Report, Marketplace, Bite, and the proto-podcast B-Side. Once, a photograph I took of a mock prison riot ended up on the cover of the National Enquirer.

My recent stories have covered AI risk, the evolution of gossip, forensic DNA, and the lessons of power. On the side, I enjoy digging into historical topics, such as California’s children’s crusade against squirrels, the Berkeley “garbage war” of 1908, and a would-be Soviet agent who went to Cal.

I attended the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I taught a section of J200: Reporting the News in fall 2017.

Some fun stuff I’ve made: the NYRB (Not Yet Real Books) cover generator, the West Marin sheriff’s calls generator, the bubble chart calculator, and the quasi-biannual Blue Angels survey.

If you made it this far, feel free to drop me a line at dave @ davegilson dot com.