A Little Bit Healthier

The problem with the avalanche of new health data that comes out every day — new studies, new stats, new theories — is that it’s hard to sift through everything and find the stuff that’s most relevant and applicable to your life. But Experience Life magazine is doing just that. For their November issue, I tackled studies that show that new moms eat lots more than their non-mom counterparts, new data on the power of Epsom salts for athletic recovery, and the dangers of over whitening your teeth with over-the-counter whitening strips.

The story isn’t online, but you can check out the magazine at your nearest newsstand.

Life Decisions

Life insurance isn’t the most exciting financial product, but most families need it. In this story for AAA Living, I tackled some of the common reasons people choose not to get it  – and whether or not those decisions could have long-term consequences.

The interactive graphic itself is pretty neat — check it out here.

How To Save A Life

It’s not hard to give lip-service to programs and people who work against domestic violence. Too often, that’s as far as it goes. But Amy Lorenz-Moser has dug deep into these issues as a lawyer, and her pro bono work focuses on women who have been jailed for life for killing their abusive spouses or partners.

There’s no question it’s ethically murky territory, but Lorenz-Moser makes a compelling case that some of these women, fearing for their own lives, killed their partners because they saw few other options if they wanted to survive. The cases she takes on are heartbreaking, but expose complicated stories that require thoughtful, nuanced solutions. In this story for Webster World, she talks about what inspired her work and how she stays focused on cases that can take years to resolve.

Read more here

Corps Work

Plenty of people go to college with the vague idea that they want to ‘save the world.’ By the time they graduate, many have settled on more practical dreams: a job, graduate school, or maybe a bit of traveling. But there are still a sizable minority who still want to make a difference, and they often get their start in the Peace Corps.

For this story for the Carleton College Voice, I talked to five decades of Carls who had gone to the Peace Corps. For some, it played a small but critical role in their future work—for others, it was a calling. One shared a telephone with an entire village; another poured much of his $1,000 annual stipend into a challenging plan to get a science fair off the ground.  None of them called it easy, but all of them reframed their understanding of the world as a result.

Read all of their stories here.

Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

More than one person has pointed out that the best camera is the one you have with you. For most of us these days, the camera we have with us is on our cell phone. And these tiny cameras are actually pretty good: plenty of megapixels, dozens of filters, and any number of ways to share our snaps with friends. The downside is that some truly remarkable film, Kodachrome, ended up in the metaphorical dustbin. Long the preferred film of photographers shooting for beautiful magazines like National Geographic, it was replaced by digital cameras with more flexibility.

The final batches of Kodachrome were processed months ago, and a small group of Webster University students, faculty, and alumni got to be a part of that history. They dug up about 100 rolls of Kodachrome and spent a summer shooting it—even though some had expired in the 1980s. The results were remarkable. In this story, you can read about their experience—and check out some of the final shots.

Read more here.

Beyond The Four-Year Degree

I’ve written a lot about different ways to cut college costs, and one thing that all the experts mention is doing some courses through community college.

One community college near me, Normandale, is helping make that task just a little bit easier with a variety of partnerships with state colleges, which I wrote about here. I love the idea of making higher ed more financially accessible, because it’s such a critical tool to help people get ahead in life.

Read more about their programs here.

Like It?

Thanks to the web, a lot of stories that I write have a second life—and sometimes even more than that. After writing an automation story package for MoneyWatch, I figured that once I saw it on the website, that would be it. But then Yahoo Finance picked it up, and it appeared on the Yahoo home page on August 1.

Yahoo can bring in some pretty serious traffic, and from what I can tell, this story has resonated with readers. According to the posted Yahoo stats, it’s gotten more than 2,000 Facebook “likes,”  200 tweets, and 1,400 comments (only about half of which are for Viagra or dating sites).

Add your likes, tweets, or comments here.

Automatic For The People

I’ve been pitching ideas to editors for more than a decade, so I feel like I should be pretty good at it at this point. But sometimes, it’s just about sheer luck. A few months ago, I was at a conference where I knew I was going to meet an editor at CBS Moneywatch. I was excited to have the chance to work for the publication, so I did my research: I studied several weeks’ of stories, I wrote down every story that had been written by a freelancer to see what departments were most likely to hire me, and I tried to figure out if they liked things like slide shows, quizzes, or videos. I checked wordcounts, I read information about their typical readers. And in the end, I came up with three sure-fire ideas I was sure the editor would love.

But when I actually met her for ten minutes that weekend, she hated all of the ideas. And so, in desperation, I pitched one last idea that I had planned to offer to another publication. And she loved it.

The result, three months later, is a two-part package on automating your finances. You can read the stories here and here.

There’s An App For That

When I write for alumni magazines, I’m usually writing about students and alumni who have succeeded in obvious ways—they won the scholarship, the grant, the award. But you don’t always have to win the prize to feel rewarded.

For this feature story for The Grinnell Magazine, I talked to students, professors, and staff about the value that comes just in putting together the application. Many students spent dozens of hours putting together applications that required them to chart out a path for months or even years. Even if they didn’t win, many often found ways to put that blueprint into action in other ways. It was a fascinating story to report, and the students were some of the most mature and thoughtful people I’ve encountered.

Read the full story here.

Science In Action

I do a lot of work for colleges and universities, and one of my favorite things to do is talk to students—they’re almost always in the middle of projects that are clever, challenging, and inspiring. So I was excited to talk to seven students from St. Edward’s University who were doing remarkable research on everything from food-borne illnesses to nanoparticles.

The stereotype of college students tends to include a lot of drinking, partying, and sleeping through class, but over the course of my writing career, I’ve had the chance to talk to hundreds of students who are embarking on ambitious plans — and that gives me a lot of optimism about the future. The stories from this feature package are just one example of this.

Read more here.