Mackenzie Funk

Mackenzie Funk

McKenzie Funk is a reporter at ProPublica’s Northwest hub and is based in Bellingham, Washington. He previously contributed to Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Harper’s, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times Magazine, covering everything from oil exploration in Arctic Alaska to private firefighters in the American West to the global race for food and farmland in Ukraine, Brazil and East Africa. He is the author of two nonfiction books: “The Hank Show” (2023), about the history and hazards of mass data collection, and the PEN Literary Award-winning “Windfall” (2014), about how governments and corporations are preparing to capitalize on a warmer world. A National Magazine Award finalist and former MacDowell, Open Society and Logan Nonfiction fellow, Funk was a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied economics and systems thinking. He speaks five languages and grew up near his namesake river, the McKenzie, in Oregon.
3 Articles

Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”

Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose…

GEO Group, an ICE Contractor Worth Billions, Fights to Pay Working Detainees as Little as $1 a Day

GEO Group, whose stock is valued at $4 billion, says that state minimum wage laws don’t apply to the cleaning…

Oregon’s Largest Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green. It Sells as Much Fossil Fuel as Before.

Seven years ago, Oregon’s biggest natural gas company set out to convince lawmakers and residents that an abundant new source…