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.
For the Atlantic, a look at the mystery of why we love cats so deeply, despite the increasingly undeniable fact that they are an invasive species on the level of Dutch elm disease or kudzu.
Review of Phyllis Korki’s The Big Thing for the New York Times Book Review:
The daily effort required to complete a major creative project is monumental — and frequently invisible. It’s rare for novelists, artists, composers or computer programmers to pull back the curtain on the granular accumulation of alarm clocks set an hour back, day-job duties plugged through, sunny afternoons spent indoors, moments with family and friends unattended. Part of this is because it would be very boring. And yet we are fascinated by famous artists’ and writers’ daily routines: Benjamin Franklin and his naked “air baths,” Patricia Highsmith’s bacon and eggs for every meal, P.G. Wodehouse’s calisthenics.
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.
Can a cat have an existential crisis? My cat Lucas’s anxiety … and my own. Story for Nautilus Magazine. (Awesome illo by Jackie Ferrentino for Nautilus.)
Elle: My Son Hates Me
About the year when my toddler son decided he was through with me:
One day last fall, my three-year-old son Danny got pink eye, and I stayed home to rub antibiotic ointment on his eyeballs every four hours. It's not easy to get a toddler to sit still while you stretch his eyelids apart and poke your finger into the crevice below. But, fortunately for bribing purposes (although unfortunately for all other purposes), the pink eye hit during the reign of ChuChu. Danny was obsessed with the seizure-inducing YouTube videos, in which obese animated babies dance jerkily and sing nursery rhymes. Over the course of a very long day, the tinny music resounded throughout the living room while Danny, feverish and dejected, sat slumped on the couch, staring at the screen of my laptop through red, mucous-y eyes.
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.
Column for Washington Post on that time when "that time when" took over the internet:
There’s something ersatz about our weird online nostalgia for very recent events. In that sense, “that time when” is extremely useful, hugging the recent past and a speaker’s audience close in a way not many other phrases do. And yet it heightens the disturbing slipstream effect of Internet time, where we never feel quite in the moment, instead always observing it through various mediating devices, recording it, time-stamping it, commenting on it, as it fades away as surely as one of Taylor Swift’s boyfriends. “That time when” will, despite our best efforts, eventually be forgotten.
Story for Foreign Policy about a new comic book series in Japan offering a sympathetic look at the lives of trans teenagers:
Manga, which command more than $5 billion in annual sales in Japan and are gaining traction abroad, have long presented gender-bending characters: heroic tomboys, villainous cross-dressers, and princesses disguised as princes. But Wandering Sonbroke new ground. Originally published in the 25,000-circulation Comic Beam magazine from 2002 to 2013, adapted into a TV series in 2011, and read by more than 1 million people in book form, the comic offers a sympathetic look at modern-day young people who grapple with gender identity in a deeply conservative society. Other manga have followed suit, introducing more authentic transgender characters.
Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists reviewed for Slate Book Review:
You can tell a lot about a family by its house Monopoly rules. The rules I grew up with, inherited from my father and his three boisterous, competitive brothers, were cutthroat. There was no namby-pamby $500 bill on Free Parking. It was completely permitted to let your game piece float a space or two ahead of where the dice dictated, so long as your opponents didn’t notice before next roll, putting everyone in a constant state of mutual suspicion that made deal-making very fraught. Games could last for days. Whenever I made a move directly against my father—buying up all his favorite orange properties, or lining an entire side of the board with hotels when he was about to pass through—he would murmur, approvingly, “You devil, you.”
Monopoly’s savagery can extend beyond the board. This past November, a New Hampshire woman was charged with domestic violence for slapping her boyfriend during a game. The British royal family, Prince Andrew said in 2008, isn’t permitted to play it at home because “it gets too vicious.” All of these people, and my own family, and anyone else who has threatened to eviscerate a loved one over their income-tax accounting, should be required to read Mary Pilon’s enthralling new history of the long, pitched battle over the origins of the game, The Monopolists. Starving out your enemy until he breaks may make for a fun family games night, but in real life, it’s significantly less enjoyable for everyone involved—the ostensible winners as well as the losers.
Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline for The New Republic:
The relationship between Rachel Cusk and the English press is like a lousy marriage from one of her own barbed, unsentimental novels. When Cusk first blew onto the scene in the early ’90s with the publication of Saving Agnes, she was a photogenic and brilliant Oxford grad who always sounded a bit depressive in interviews. British journalists—in love with the glamour of privilege, but always suspicious of someone who might not be enjoying it appropriately—responded with backhanded flattery. “The life of Rachel Cusk is not a tale for those of envious disposition,” wrote TheTimes of London in 1995. When Vogue profiled her around the publication of Saving Agnes, the story began, “Don’t you just hate people like Rachel Cusk?”
Dispatch from a once-pristine Finnish lake now murky with peat sediment – and how fishermen are fighting back. Photo by Atte Grönlund on Unsplash
My story for Washingtonian on the time D.C.'s Catholic University went single-sex in its dorms -- and students learned to sneak through windows and up gutterpipes to circumvent the new rules. Illustration for Washingtonian by Tomi Um.
Travel story for the Washington Post, in which I chase the Moomins through Finland:
Read MoreIt’s raining gently, and I’m standing in an outdoor theater, in the middle of a crowd of children and parents. Onstage, an actor in a giant, square-shaped fur suit with a red triangle nose lumbers from foot to foot and shakes his head, waggling the pink tentacles atop it. Another man, in a police officer’s uniform, is making officious gestures, while a woman with long red hair, wearing a peaked red cap and red robes and with whiskers painted on her face, speaks squeakily into a microphone in Finnish, a language I do not remotely understand.
This is not some sauna-induced nightmare: It’s the afternoon’s theatrical offering at Moominworld, an amusement park in the coastal Finnish town of Naantali. The actors are playing minor characters in the Moomin stories, a series of children’s books by Tove Jansson, a Swedish-Finnish author and artist who would have turned 100 this month. (She died in 2001.) The Moomins themselves — a family of three: Moomintroll, Moominpappa and Moominmamma — are hippolike creatures with ballooning snouts and tubby bellies, always setting off on bold quests or making discoveries.
In June, I set off on a quest of my own, traveling through Finland in search of the Moomin-land I’ve loved since I read the books in English translation as a child.
Washingtonian: Private Social Clubs are Doomed
Checking up on the fortunes of D.C.'s most exclusive private clubs:
Washington’s social clubs have survived periods of crisis before, namely the 1960s, when they struggled over whether to admit African-Americans—attorney general Robert F. Kennedy once boycotted the then whites-only Metropolitan Club—and the ’80s, when male bastions like the Cosmos and the Metropolitan faced the apparently more staggering question of whether to admit women. It may be too early, in other words, to say the game is up for Washington’s private clubs. Facing today’s existential challenges, they’re evolving in ways that would have been unimaginable to their founders.