Daniel Shailer

Associated Press Correspondent, Mexico City

Mexico

Daniel Shailer is a correspondent with the Associated Press' Central and South America bureau in Mexico City.

Previously he's worked as an award-winning, environmental freelance reporter, and with the Tucson Sentinel in southern Arizona, where he's covered everything from mining and waste to local politics and conservation.

Daniel has written narrative features, investigations and news articles with photo, audio and data.

His freelance reporting has appeared in the New Yorker, Gothamist and Business Insider. He has written essays for the LA Review of Books and Literary Hub. His articles from the Associated Press have been syndicated by the Washington Post, ABC, The Independent, and more.

Daniel's stories on water pollution in New York City won awards from the Overseas Press Club and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He was not Covering Climate Now's 2023 student journalist of the year, but at least he was shortlisted.

M: [email protected]
T: Mex: +52 5591975616// UK & WhatsApp: +44 7585 553427

Portfolio

Mexico

Best of NYC

The New Yorker
08/21/2023
Tits Out Under the Verrazzano

Leslie Hamilton, an accountant, battled sea lice and rusting garbage barges as she became the first person on record to swim a lap around Staten Island since 1979.

Investigations

TucsonSentinel.com
08/22/2023
Greenwashing a dump?: Los Reales 'Sustainability Campus' turns 2

Two years ago, the city's new "sustainability campus" promised to get Tucson waste-free by 2050. What's changed since then? The old landfill has a new sign out front and plenty of plans, some of which local advocates call greenwashing.

New York Focus
10/29/2022
'They Lied to All of Us': Ten Years After Hurricane Sandy,...

Staten Island residents who sold their homes to the state as part of one of the country's first major "managed retreats" were promised the land would be returned to nature. Instead, part of it is being turned into a soccer complex.

Columbia News Service
10/11/2022
New Research Shows Cost of Flood-Risk Secrecy for New York Home Buyers

"It's shady. We had no idea." Thousands of New Yorkers move into flood-prone homes every year and (because of a decades old loophole) no one warns them. The loophole was nearly closed this year, till real estate lobbyists fought to keep it. Here's how.

Features

Planet A Magazine
05/04/2023
Kelp Me, Kelp You

As the corporate clamor for carbon-capturing crops grows louder, a Brooklyn kelp farm tries to find the balance between building community and cashing in.

Adventure Uncovered
10/15/2022
Paddling towards a new relationship with wildness

Elizabeth Jane-Burnet wrote that upturning earth is a way of listening to the ground speak. If that’s true, then for almost a century Arne Peninsula, on the south coast of Dorset, has been screaming. A kayak in search of wild-ness.

Environment

TucsonSentinel.com
08/22/2023
Enviros sue Forest Service over exploratory Patagonia drilling

Arizona environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service on Tuesday morning, alleging that permits for exploratory mining will threaten ecologically vulnerable areas of the Patagonia Mountains south of Tucson.

Columbia News Service
10/20/2022
DOJ Weighs Case against ConEd for Alleged Pollution of Hudson River

This August, Manhattan residents accused ConEd of dumping hot, dirty water into the Hudson at Pier 98, and gave 60 days to respond. Advocates wanted answers; they got silence. The deadline just passed and now the Department of Justice is weighing federal prosecution.

Sentient Media
03/30/2022
The Future of Beavers Depends on Learning Lessons From the Past

In May 2019, the Eurasian beaver was officially declared a native species in Scotland. Since then, over 200 have been killed. What's more, each of those deaths was licensed by NatureScot, the official agency charged with " inspir[ing] everyone to care more" about Scottish wildlife.

Varsity Online
The Murky Waters of Netflix's Seaspriacy

An in-depth review of the science and presentation of hit Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy. What does director Tabrizi get right and where does his sensationalism tell the wrong story? As public consumers, what can we take from the film into our daily lives and politics?

Sports

Military Families
06/27/2022
Healing waves: How a California surf community is helping veterans manage PTSD - Military Health...

After 24 years as a combat engineer and demolition specialist, Gordon 'Gordy' Ewell left the Army as a master sergeant with no hearing and minimal eyesight after suffering six IED explosions. And yet, despite the loss of his senses, Ewell's most lasting injuries were mental: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and all of the life-changing symptoms that come along with it.

Dure Magazine
02/10/2022
"Swimming is a part of who I am. I don't think I'll ever walk away"

Despite being the best ultra-marathon swimmer in the world, let alone her country, Swim Australia refuse to recognise her achievements: ostensibly because each record was 'not a race'. Swimming, Surviving DV and Media with the World's Greatest open water swimmer.

Outdoor Swimmer Magazine
07/01/2020
How has COVID-19 affected English Channel swims this year?

Channel swimmers are used to uncertainty but this year, more than ever, has frayed the patience of athletes and those helping them across alike. Daniel Shailer investigates how this unique community is adapting to unusual circumstances. With restrictions changing on a weekly basis, all that is certain is that any swimmers lucky enough to leave Dover this year will have plenty of stories to tell.

Varsity Online
The Varsity Channel Race and its legendary history

Since Captain Matthew Webb made the first crossing in 1875, the English Channel has been a personal testing ground for open-water swimmers around the world. Thought of as the 'Mount Everest' of endurance swimming, the idea of racing across might seem at best pointless and at worst dangerous: 21 miles of unpredictable tides, tankers and jellyfish.

DanSwims (Personal Blog)
07/25/2020
Inspiring Swimmers

Sarah Thomas, sharks and the swim that had Reagan and Gorbachev talking

Arts

Los Angeles Review of Books
10/03/2022
"The Self Is a Collaborative Thing": A Conversation with David Baker

IF A WHALE falls in the ocean, does it make a sound? What parasites, abyssal crustaceans, and scavenger hagfish will come to call it home? Will marine particles aggregate on its body "like snow," forming "the merest blueprint of whale"?

Musical Opinion
10/01/2022
La bohème

The sun is rising on Act IV of La bohème at the Colliseum. A set which has rotated through Parisian cafes and bohemian flats is now being silently, slowly shunted back to where it began by a troupe of stage-hands. ‘That looks difficult’ someone whispers. They’re not wrong. In a way, much of this production (the fifth English National Opera revival of Jonathan Miller’s original) looks more difficult than it needs too.

Literary Hub
07/11/2022
In Praise of the Greatest Book About Swimming Ever Written

I was introduced to Haunts of the Black Masseur in a Carnaby Street café. From octopus porn to the Victorian seaside, it is ceaselessly curious, kind and fluid. Last month marked it's 30th birthday: a strange, cult swim-y book by Charles Sprawson.

Whatsonstage
02/25/2022
The Animal Kingdom at Hampstead Theatre

What happens if you put all the awkwardness, discomfort and pain of family therapy through the sausage grinder of a drawing-room drama? No punning repartee, shady affairs or mysterious characters appearing in the night - just difficult conversations, long pauses and jugs of tap water.

The New Voice
02/14/2022
Osman Yousefzada's 'The Go-Between'

Yousefzada's memoir is a compelling story of fluid identity in modern Britain - a tale of constant personal reinvention and self-made success in one of the world's most competitive industries.

The UnderSCENE
10/29/2021
The Female of the Species is More Deadly Than the Male (Part I)

Classic horror movies are not known, in general, for setting the gold standard when it comes to representation. How is a season at the Prince Charles turning the tables with female monsters? A retrospective starting with "Dracula's Daughter" (1936).

English National Opera
11/22/2021
The Valkyrie

‘About as big as it gets’ says Martin Brabbins: ENO Music Director and conductor for this new production of The Valkyrie. When it comes to the orchestra, he’s not wrong: harps and timpani spill out of the pit and up into boxes at the Coliseum. But in every other sense, this new production seems to shy away from bigness. What it gains in contemporaneity and intimacy, it loses (dearly) in awful, moving power.

The Spy in the Stalls
11/25/2021
While the Sun Shines

An English sailor, American bombardier and French lieutenant walk into a room. Soon they are sleeping together, playing craps for a Duke’s daughter and arguing for cross-border consensus on that timeless question echoing across dancefloors: what is love.

Travel & Adventure

DanSwims (Personal Blog)
10/19/2021
The Mermaid of Zennor

What do mermaids, my Dad's school assemblies in the '60s and Marine Protected Areas have in common?

DanSwims (Personal Blog)
08/23/2020
The Big Swim

"So Daniel, we've got a plan." Swimming the Channel: 15 hours, 60 kilometres and plenty of jellyfish.

DanSwims (Personal Blog)
06/17/2020
Byron's Pool

As lockdown looms, some friends and I make the trip to Byron's Pool. Do the poet's circle of gentlemen swimmers have anything to teach us about reconnecting with nature today?