For Washingtonian, a profile of two married activists and their dramatic, wrenching escape from Putin’s Russia:

On Instagram, Anya saw gay couples leave the country. Lera would always tell Anya she wanted to stay and fight. “I believed in activism,” Lera says. “That we could change things.” Increasingly, Anya had doubts. “When you are flying and the plane is going down,” she says, “you know it will hit the ground.”

For the Washington Post, a look at the precarious private lives of Instacart shoppers:

At 5:50 a.m. on a Wednesday in late June, the sun just peeking over the horizon, Larry Askew woke up in the front seat of his Nissan Sentra. The Sentra was parked where it is every night: in a lot across from Wegmans on Wisconsin Avenue NW in D.C. And once he woke up, Askew did what he does every morning: stuck on his black plastic glasses — missing an arm because he’d accidentally sat on them — drove across the street to the Wegmans parking garage, opened the Instacart app on his phone and started scrolling.

Photo by Craig Hudson for the Washington Post

For Washingtonian magazine, a feature about the tragic and infuriating fall of one of DC’s trans legends, Casa Ruby founder Ruby Corado:

The people who worked for and relied on Casa Ruby have been left to wonder how something that had inspired so much hope could go so terribly wrong. “Have you seen Inventing Anna on Netflix?” asks former Casa Ruby employee Tania Cordova, referring to the streaming series about convicted con artist Anna “Delvey” Sorokin, who posed as a German heiress and swindled more than $200,000. “That’s Ruby. We joke about ‘Inventing Ruby.’ ”

Feature for the Washington Post magazine on the Mama Bears: a secret Facebook group, founded by Christian moms of LGBTQ+ kids, that helps parents learn to advocate for their queer children.

Kimberly Shappley, a Connecticut woman with a trans daughter, joined the Mama Bears in the early days, when it was “still very much centered on being Christian — otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed in the group, to be honest,” she told me. Reading other Christian moms’ posts celebrating their queer kids was transformational for Shappley. “I had never been exposed to LGBTQ things in a way that wasn’t negative or derogatory,” she recalls. “And here were these people in the group presenting pictures of their children; their parents are proud of them and they’re going to college, and they have somebody they love.”

Illustration by Luis Mendo for the Washington Post

I spent two years reporting this feature for Washingtonian magazine, about a group of people who were harassed for nearly 12 years by a racist troll who happened to be a State Department employee. Over that period, the victims — staffers at the Arab-American Institute in DC — feared for their lives and suffered PTSD symptoms. But due to bureaucratic enabling and gaps in hate-crimes enforcement, they were helpless to stop what many believed could be another mass shooting event. (Image by Jeff Eakins for Washingtonian.)

Hate isn’t illegal, but death threats such as “The only good Arab is a dead Arab” are, and Bristol knew he couldn’t betray emotion in the interview, lest he risk jeopardizing any part of the confession. But by this point, he had spent more than 100 hours interviewing Syring’s victims and he was suppressing revulsion. “This is a world that we don’t visit often, the hatemongers,” he says. “It’s not a pleasant place to be.” It was galling to hear Syring admit—with no sense of guilt or regret—that he was their troll. “There was no nervousness on his part,” Bristol remembers, “no reluctance.” Syring couldn’t see what he had done wrong.

For the Washington Post magazine, I wrote about a collection of newly preserved records at Virginia’s Central State Hospital, the first ever mental hospital for African American patients, and what they tell us about racism then and now. Image of female patients at Central State from Wikipedia.

Patients could be hospitalized for manias supposedly brought on by “religious excitement” or “freedom.” Women were committed because they were upset about their husband’s desertion, or because they had intense menstrual pain. People could be committed by a White employer or by others in the community, essentially on hearsay, with little chance to defend their sanity in court. Shelby Pumphrey, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American history at Vassar College who has studied Central’s turn-of-the-century records closely, found only one reported instance of someone who avoided being committed once a process was initiated — and no one who committed themselves. Many patients attempted to escape, and many others, like Stewart, died of unrelated illnesses contracted in the hospital. Those who died were buried in unmarked graves, some of which may have been disturbed by grave robbers hunting for cadavers to be used at local medical colleges.

For the Washington Post magazine, a look at what happens when your family’s trauma becomes entertainment for millions:

Despite all the opportunities it offers, the true-crime boom has put Thomas and other victims’ relatives in some awkward positions. There’s the very real risk of using these new outlets too aggressively and alienating law enforcement. And then there’s the fact that thrill-seeking true-crime fans (and the media serving them) can sometimes forget that Cathy Thomas and other victims were real people, not just characters in a titillating narrative. “Some people are approaching this as entertainment. Which is fine!” Thomas told me. “And then some of us are trying to use those avenues of news and entertainment with an objective towards solving unsolved cases. Occasionally, these worlds kind of collide.”

Illustration by Anke Gladnick for the Washington Post magazine.

For Washingtonian, a story on what happens when D.C.’s therapists start needing therapy themselves:

 I spent the last several months talking to nearly two dozen local therapists who described skyrocketing levels of interest in their services. They told me about cases of ordinary stress blossoming into clinical conditions, patients who can’t get through a session without invoking the President’s name, couples and families falling apart over politics—a broad category of concerns that one practitioner, Beth Sperber Richie, says she and her colleagues have come to categorize as “Trump trauma.”

In one sense, that’s been good news for the people who help keep us sane: Their calendars are full. But Trump trauma has also created particular clinical challenges for therapists like Guttman and her students. It’s one thing to listen to a client discuss a horrible personal incident. It’s another when you’re experiencing the same collective trauma.

For the Washington Post magazine, a story about a sport that’s also a form of activism — same-gender ballroom dance.

Chasteen says that same-gender dancing doesn’t just provide a gorgeous aesthetic experience; it can also help open minds. Watching two men or two women dancing can be a shock at first to audiences more accustomed to the gender roles in traditional dance. But the creative and highly visual way same-gender dance allows partners to be passive and active, macho and flowery, in turn, can feel transformative, and not just on the dance floor. “We are activists,” Chasteen told me.

For the Washington Post magazine, a story about one of D.C.’s greatest and least-heralded athletes, 42-year-old champion boxer Tori Nelson: her improbable journey and her reluctance to quit.

Outside the ring, Nelson is, in the words of her friend and fellow boxer Tyrieshia Douglas, “a nice churchy lady.” She spends half an hour each day reading and discussing Bible verses with her longtime boyfriend. She’s a hugger, a baby nuzzler, a bestower of silly nicknames. Then she enters the ring and something terrifying emerges, something that won’t let her stop punching until she has annihilated the person in the opposite corner.

Photo by Calla Kessler for the Washington Post.

My latest article for the Washington Post magazine tells the story of a church in wealthy Loudoun County, Va., that over several decades began (according to accounts from dozens of former members) to sexually, physically, and spiritually abuse its congregants. Former members have been waiting for years for results from an ongoing investigation into abuses -- and as they wait, they have to reckon not just with the legacy of the church itself, but with the legacy of their own actions while under the church's control. How does existing in an oppressive and cruel institution affect our moral selves, and how can someone exiting an institution of this sort find healing and forgiveness, from themselves and others?

During the process of reporting this story, I was kicked out of multiple church events, including a show for the church's "race car ministry," all while hugely pregnant; I also got called a "vehicle of Satan" in a recent sermon (starts around 1:40). Enjoy!

My piece for Marie Claire on #resistance warriors -- all women -- who suffered professionally due to their extracurricular activities: 

Briskman’s, Moses’, and Avelenda’s cases are extreme but not unique. Several high-profile women in media, for instance, have been fired or suspended after speaking out against Trump: ESPN anchor Jemele Hill was suspended from ESPN after calling Trump a “white supremacist” on Twitter and defending NFL players who took a knee during the national anthem and journalist Julia Ioffe was fired from Politico for joking on Twitter about Trump-family incest. Since Avelenda left her job, she has connected with perhaps a dozen other women who felt targeted due to their political activities. To be sure, all three women work for private employers, and at the office, controversial comments or political views are not always protected by First Amendment rights. Yet women, already vulnerable professionally due to the gender pay gap and other aspects of workplace sexism, may need such protections the most.

For the Washington Post Magazine, talking to people who lost a close family member or friend in the past year, from a 97-year-old opera singer to a 7-month-old infant, from a 65-year-old man who died in the hospital surrounded by friends and family to an 18-year-old shot on a lonely street. 

Truth Thomas (best friend of Michael Johnson): "You think about what your life means. What impact you’re going to make here. What’s important and what is not important. I think I’ve come to a peace about that — that it’s enough. That I don’t have to do anything special. You know? That I’m okay, that I’m valuable. Just because I’m alive. Mike mattered because he was a loving person. Even in death he was a heroic person."

Images by Greg Kahn/GRAIN for the Washington Post magazine

For the Washington Post magazine, my report on how local third-graders see the world, everything from Donald Trump to vividly experienced racism to farts and dinosaurs:

Kristian Wiley, DC Scholars: Back in the day they used to hit us, used to hit black people with the rope, and now they don’t.

Jakara Baccous, DC Scholars: Back in the day ... they had whips and they beat the black man with the whips so badly and they threw him into the pond.

Malaya Paulk, Robert R. Gray: In slavery they used to hang black people up on the trees with a rope, and white folks, they liked that because they didn’t want black people in their neighborhood. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. had the right to fight.

Illo by Adam Hayes for the Washington Post.

Ten years ago this week, Seung-Hui Cho killed 33 people on Virginia Tech’s campus in what was then the largest mass shooting in American history. Over the last few months, on assignment for Washingtonian, I spent many hours with the families of those killed and wounded. They’re all still grieving intensely, but the community that formed immediately after the tragedy has gone in many different directions – some turning to passionate gun-safety advocacy, others signing up for the NRA, some retreating into privacy. Here’s their story.

Transcendentalist, environmentalist … gamer? I profile the new “Walden” game from USC’s Game Innovation Lab for Smithsonian magazine.

Meet the only DMV-area math tutor who’s also a Nebula-award-winning science-fiction novelist: the fabulous Catherine Asaro. Photo for Washingtonian by Jeff Elkins.

I went to Rehoboth this spring to report for Washingtonian on a crazily escalating feud between long-time residents who feel overrun by development, and the perceived interlopers they tried to quash – and with politically savvy Washington residents on both sides, things got ugly, to the tune of large-scale rallies outside City Hall, allegations of political corruption and dark money, a string of lawsuits, social media spats, and neighbors turning against neighbors. And I got fascinated with the dark history of Rehoboth, a beautiful place that has long witnessed ugly battles – sometimes with actual bloodshed, as with a string of gay-bashing incidents in the 80s and 90s – over who gets to call themselves an local.

The most popular true crime isn’t Serial – it’s Wives with Knives, and a handful of other schlocky, brilliant shows from Investigation Discovery. My story for Washingtonian on how the network got to be so addictive. Photo courtesy Indigo Films.

Dispatch from a once-pristine Finnish lake now murky with peat sediment – and how fishermen are fighting back. Photo by Atte Grönlund on Unsplash