About me

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

Currently, I am a senior editor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I oversee coverage of faculty research and edit 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. 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 also investigated a forgotten murder case involving the National Rifle Association’s top lawyer.

My work has received awards and other recognition and 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, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My radio stories have aired on KQED’s The California Report, Marketplace, and the proto-podcast B-Side. Ask me how a photograph I took 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 am a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I’ve taught introductory news reporting.

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.