Refugee work in The New York Times /November 24, 2015 by Ashley Gilbertson

Uncertain Journeys, a series shot on assignment for UNICEF was recently published along with an opinion piece that I wrote was published as a series in The New York Times' Sunday Review section.

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Here’s an 02h00 Downtown Bread Route race on a fucking school night thrown by the one and only @orchardstreetrunners

Best artists to ever live (even with Jello). Better than Bach. Than Nas. And, yeah, fight me.

Day or night. No better running city. No better city. Fight me.

30 Hours in a Hurricane, on a Race With No Course Late last year, @shannonsimon of the @nytmag called and told me to up my weekly mileage - she wanted to send me to West Virginia backcountry to photograph @doug.bock.clark and his team during the Adventure Racing National Championships. From Doug’s story: “When you’re navigating well, you and the map and the world merge. You become hyperaware of the slope of the ground, the bends in a valley, how many meters and kilometers your footsteps have paced out. It’s an immersion in oneself and nature, the interior and exterior worlds — harking back to when navigation was essential to humanity’s survival as hunter-gatherers. Your mind attunes itself to magnetic north almost as much as your compass does.” Link in profile, Captions below. 1. Racers finishing a bicycle section of the 2024 adventure-racing national championships at Snowshoe mountain in West Virginia. 2. Doug Bock Clark during the championship race. 3. Racers rely on compasses and contour maps, which to the untrained eye look like illegible spaghetti but to the knowledgeable reader transform 2-D paper into a 3-D hologram. 4. The writer, accompanied by his teammate MacRae Linton, checking his compass bearing during the storm. 5. The writer’s team after they were almost hit by a tree that fell in the storm. I found Jed standing beside the fallen trunk. He had managed to dodge the main spar, so that only minor branches swiped him. He was staring at a tinfoil-wrapped beef burrito the way that Hamlet regarded Yorick’s skull. Jed, an academic and Times contributor, seemed poised to quote W.B. Yeats or another great poet, as he sometimes does. Instead, he observed that he had saved his own life without spilling any of his snack. 6. Racers crossing a footbridge in the Monongahela National Forest after completing a bonus section. 7. Doug riding toward a bonus checkpoint. 8. Jedediah Britton-Purdy and MacRae Linton fording a stream after finding a checkpoint. 9. An all-female team during an overnight run/walk section of the race. 10. Doug and MacRae crossing the finish line.

Mayor Eric Adams: He promised law and order. Instead, his scandal-ridden mayoralty became a symbol — and engine — of the city’s chaos. Edited by @amykellner & @j_dims for The @nytmag 1. Adams rallied at a Brooklyn church with supporters who prayed for him amid calls for his removal. 2. Mayor Adams 3. Food delivery workers and their e-bikes have become ubiquitous across the city. 4. Thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets and in the subway system as commuters and pedestrians pass by. 5. Adams is deeply unpopular, and many New Yorkers want him removed from office. 6. The city’s struggles to house more than 200,000 migrants became a defining crisis of Adams’s term. 7. Fare beaters hurdle turnstiles every day as a matter of course. 8. Adams on Feb. 17, the day half his deputy mayors announced their resignation. 9. Drugstores keep sundries locked away from shoplifters — and everyone else. 10. Signs of drug use are common in the subway. Paramedics were called to the Delancey Street-Essex Street station for an overdose on Feb. 19. 11. At a Black History Month celebration at Gracie Mansion, Adams said some people were disposable matches and others were flames worth protecting. 12. Men warming themselves over steaming grates outside Gramercy Park, a greensward so exclusive it requires a key. 13. Migrants waiting outside Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, which city officials have called “the new Ellis Island.” 14. A federal indictment showed the mayor of the nation’s wealthiest city soliciting illegal donations from foreign interests — which he has denied. 15. In the face of dwindling poll numbers, Adams maintains he still has a path to re-election.

Notes from a heavy mileage week in the wildest weirdest best city in the world. I ❤️ NY

02h00, thermometer in the single digits, fresh dusting of snow on the ground, dozens of runners lined up to race through Midtown Manhattan for an @orchardstreetrunners bread route. LFG.

“I don’t do video” lol… On set with dead set legend @groocha

From my journal on Jan 6, 2021: …a few meters away there’s a group, one with a confederate flag, smashing the windows of an entryway. I see Christopher Lee. Good to see a friendly face. The crowd gets in and busts open a door and people stream into the building. I rush in with them. And the first few frames I make in those beautiful, ornate passageways of the lead group to breach the Capitol have Ron Haviv - another VIl photographer - and Christopher in them. My images are out of focus and have movement so I take a moment to change my camera settings. There’s no police to be seen. And it feels like there’s no sense of where people are going. No idea where the chambers are. I have no idea- it’s my first time in here, like it is for most of the insurectionists too. And then they’re moving through the hallways, and the front group stops. I walk into the scene and there’s one police officer, standing there, shouting at them. He’s telling them to stop, they’re telling him to move, they move towards him and he grabs at his pistol. I see him unclip the holster for his weapon and I make sure there’s a protester between me and him - ten inches of flesh should be enough to stop a 9mm I figure and keep working. But incredibly this officer–an African American man being confronted by scores of white nationalists, one of them actually carrying a Confederate flag, others in helmets and armor, some of them with spears and bats–shows restraint. He threatens and he shouts, and he points and screams and holds his ground, and talks into a small radio on his shirt. And then he runs up the stairs. The group follows, and they round the stairs, and follow him into a room with more officers… Thanks for having my back @amykellner & @kathyryan

U.S. insurance companies deny 850 million claims every year, a strategy putting profits over customer health. Patients don’t realize that 50% of appeals have a chance of success. One new company, @getclaimable is going head to head with the big guys to generate appeals for us. I visited Missouri to meet some of the patients that needed help–and got it. Link in profile to a short doc @talkingeyesmedia and @getclaimable made with sound and images we gathered of inspiring patients we met. Captions: “Just when I think there’s hope, they take it away again.” Said Michelle Sharpe, 59, who was filing an appeal for a denied insurance claim in Bridgeton, MO. “Even for me, with a practice management background, to know the whole course of having to file an appeal, how to do it - you just get exhausted.” Said Denice Brown, at her home in St Louis, MO. “How do you deem something medically neccesary for three treatments and then you drop it?” Said Jennifer Hagnauer-Braunagel, in Granite City, MO. “I can barely walk my ankles

Christmas parties that include 13 miles of racing are good luck. If you don’t believe me ask @corey.m.weiss @orchardstreetrunners