since my return to the Dallas Morning News in 2009 following my fellowship year, I have been a culture critic. Trading in my old title of movie critic formalized my interdisciplinary impulses and gives me more room to roam, … Read more
Coefficients of dispersion. Chasing the sale. Maintenance years. Three things I knew almost nothing about when I got a tip from a software engineer that something was gravely wrong with the property tax system in Wisconsin. The tipster … Read more
I have been fascinated with fact-checking ever since I first read about it during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Now I’m proud to have brought this tradition to Nepal and the surrounding region as founder of South Asia … Read more
My NPR podcast “Hidden Brain” launched this fall, but it’s been more than a decade in the making, one that started mere blocks from Lippmann House. While reporting for The Washington Post in 2004, I interviewed Harvard psychologist … Read more
My life changed on a cold, dark, rainy January morning in 2011. Worried about a modest tremor in my left hand, my doctor had referred me to a neurologist. At the appointment, I was asked to perform various motor … Read more
In the summers during college, I drove taxis in Philadelphia. All sorts of people opened up in the anonymity of a cab. Three decades later, while covering China for NPR, I felt my stories lacked a sense of … Read more
after 15 years of assignments in war zones around the globe, I’ve found that the hopes, dreams, and nightmares of enemies are often more similar than they are different. This is the story I need to share. In my … Read more
So often, journalists are quick to dismiss stories that have been done before, especially those that have been written over and over again. But what if you could take a subject everyone has known about for years—an open secret—and … Read more
The journey to write “Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality” began April 3, 2009, when the Iowa Supreme Court granted gays and lesbians the right to marry in Iowa. It will end June … Read more
For 11 years, I worked somewhere famous. Now, I work somewhere virtually unknown. In January, I left “All Things Considered” (“ATC”)—seven months since my Nieman fellowship ended—to create a position at NPR’s newly rebooted training unit, Editorial Coaching and Development. Read more
