I interviewed six fathers and father figures who have lost sons to police violence about what it’s like raising a Black man in America.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I wrote a short profile of Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, whose killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri helped launch the Black Live Matter movement. McSpadden reflected on her son’s death following the killing of George Floyd.

This feature tells the story of a little-known experiment from the late 60s and early 70s to integrate 20 prep schools in the South. It explores the opportunities and costs for a pioneer group of black students at one of those schools, Virginia Episcopal. (A version of this story also aired on This American Life.)

This feature was my first for The Times Magazine. I profiled a boy named Shamir and his friends, spending a summer with them as they fought off boredom and temptation while navigating the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn.

This is the first piece I wrote as the sin and vice reporter for the metro section of The Times (an assignment that inspired its own coverage). The story takes readers inside a brothel in the city's theater district, where businessmen in the know would pop in after the work day.

I was the lead writer on a team of reporters that pulled together this front-page feature for The New York Times, which profiled the bizarre life of a university dean who killed herself while on trial for fraud.

The story of Samuel Battle, the man who led the desegregation of the New York Police Department and who history might have forgotten if not for the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, for The New York Times.

Gay and bisexual men flocked to New York in search of sexual freedom but they found darker things with it - H.I.V., homelessness and social isolation. Many also found a deeper shame: using crystal meth became central to their sex lives.

The tale of the Choudhry family, detailed in hundreds of pages of court documents, was a feud of Shakespearean proportions, sprawling across two continents and the shifting cultures that the immigrants and their American children inhabited.

A longform feature about the complexities of one man's struggles to overcome addictions and to find meaningful, legal work through a city jobs program, and about how that program faltered, leaving participants on the edge.