Journalism

Selected articles by Michael Ray Taylor

A Trove of Ice Age Fossils Buried in a Wyoming Cave Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Prehistoric Animals. In this June 2025 cover story for Smithsonian Magazine, a team led by paleontologist Julie Meachen explores a cave of subterranean bones. She and I described the experience for the Smithsonian podcast, “There’s More to That.”

More Thunder: Mountaintop Development Rumbles Ahead Amid Setbacks. A 2025 follow-up to my 2024 Nashville Scene series on a mountaintop development above an “swiss cheese” of abandoned coal mines. Part 2 of the follow-up focuses on the developer-friendly government of Marion County. And then in June 2025, one good ol’ boy in the county government wound up in the jailhouse.

Subterranean Blues: A Journey to forbidden caverns on the Buffalo National River. The time has come to reopen federal caves–closed years ago to combat White Nose Syndrome–to limited recreational caving. From a print spread in Arkansas Times, March 2025.

Humanities Tennessee, the nonprofit publisher of Chapter 16, celebrated its 50th anniversary with 50 Years/50 books, where each week one 50 authors and reviewers selected a book somehow connected to the state, writing an essay and leading a public conversation. I celebrated Fletch by Gregory McDonald, who lived and wrote in Tennessee during his later years, with an essay called “Fletch Inhaled Twice.” For my talk, which you can watch online, I enlisted the bestselling crime novelist Ace Atkins.

From the Nashville Scene’s Green Issue 2024:

Crash Kennedy, America’s Cave Gater, gates a cave in Nashville.

Do luxury homesites sit above an environmental catastrophe? See this three-part series in Nashville Scene. When the developer sued one of his sources for libel, I wrote this opinion piece, followed by this short article when a judge ruled the libel suit an unwarranted attack on free speech. 2025 update: Developer must pay over $200K in libel defense fees.

A new quarry threatens rare cave life and local water supplies in Grundy County. The fight against it is echoed at other quarries throughout Tennessee, as described in this Nashville Scene cover story on July 7, 2022. A sidebar maps out some of the current quarry quarrels in the state.

A group of dedicated volunteers seek to preserve historic African American cemeteries threatened by both development and neglect, as reported in this Nashville Scene article in September 2022, with photo essay by Hamilton Matthew Masters.

In 1983, I entered graduate school at the University of South Carolina with a fellowship in creative writing. There I began taking classes with the poet, novelist, essayist and screenwriter James Dickey, a mentor who would change my life. I recall Mr. Dickey’s classes and teaching style in this 2022 essay for Chapter 16.

In October 2021, a group of hunters, cavers, and residents banded together to fight the logging of old hardwoods from state land on the Cumberland Plateau. This Nashville Scene essay chronicled and supported their efforts. It was linked a few days later by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times.

In Alabama and Tennessee, as throughout the South, caves and wild areas are threatened by proposed quarries and other industrial projects. This New York Times essay, published in January 2021, describes environmental battles on Butler Mountain and in Coffee County.

I followed three cave historians as they document forgotten Civil War-era signatures on the walls of Mammoth Cave for National Parks Magazine in an article that became the basis of a chapter in Hidden Nature.

Each winter researchers ramp up efforts to study and control White-Nose Syndrome, a fungal disease decimating North American bats, but experts ask whether it might be better to let nature take its course. A 2018 opinion piece in The New York Times.

Sympathy for the Devil: A 2018 journalism scandal evokes memories of my early fear of facing the man in the street, as I was assigned to do in downtown Houston — a personal essay for the College Media Review.

A 2017 interview with the late John Prine, facilitated by his wife, Fiona Whelan. The iconic singer/songwriter discusses his early days, his writing process, and the ghosts of Nashville.

Central Kentucky is bourbon country. Its rolling meadows, limestone-filtered streams, and cool hardwood forests have long provided ideal conditions for producing the honey-colored drink. An abridged version of a 2010 article for National Geographic Traveler, one of several “road trip” stories written for the magazine.

A campground flood on the Little Missouri River in southwest Arkansas killed over 20 people one harrowing night in the summer of 2010. The river gauge tells the tragic tale in this account published in Outside Online.

I grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida, listening to a teenage rock band practice down the street — a band that happened to include two brothers named Duane and Gregg. In this 2008 review of Randy Poe’s Skydog: The Duane Allman Story for Nashville Scene, I recalled my childhood encounter with the band and those wild Allman boys.

NASA scientists announced in 1996 that they had detected signs of ancient life in a Martian meteorite. The results have been debated ever since, with little consensus. In 2006, 10 years after the announcement, I interviewed the principals for the Houston Chronicle.

Even as Marion O. Smith and his team explored and mapped an amazing cave system in secret, a planned sewage treatment plant threatened to destroy it. Published in Sports Illustrated in 2003. Sadly, in 2025 the owners of SI killed its online vault of past features, so the SI links on this page no longer work — at least temporarily. A version of the article appears as Chapter 13 in the book Hidden Nature.

In 2002, the PBS series Nova published this account of one of the first visits to Lake Castrovalva in New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave.

In 1994, Sports Illustrated sent me to Mexico to watch as famed cave diver Sheck Exley set a world scuba depth record in a massive underwater cave. Witnessing the tragedy that unfolded ultimately led to my first book, Cave Passages. Reprinted in A Century of Great Exploration and a finalist for Best American Sports Writing.

Welcome to the Grim Crawl of Death, just one of the scary features of Great Expectations, a classic Wyoming cave. This article, the longest printed in Sports Illustrated in 1988 (per features editor Chris Hunt), describes the discovery and exploration of a cave that is now a protected preserve of the National Speleological Society. Expanded as a chapter of Cave Passages.

More journalism

More reviews and interviews from Chapter 16.

More articles from Sports Illustrated [si.com killed its archive in 2025, but I will attempt to post PDFs of personal faves in 2026].

Rockets and cryobots at Wired.

More articles from the Houston Chronicle, written during a fellowship from the American Society of News Editors.

More reviews and interviews from Nashville Scene.