For the Chicago Tribune’s Vintage Tribune, a look at the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, or W.I.T.C.H., a satirical protest tactic that baffled both press and congressional subcommittees, a performance piece with an FBI file. W.I.T.C.H. ran a series of hexes around Chicago in 1969 and 1970, then vanished, leaving authorities chasing phantoms.

In this Chicago Reader cover story, I profiled three local speakers of Myaamiaataweenki, the Indigenous language that gave Chicago its name. As the last native speakers died sometime in the 1960s or ’70s, today’s speakers use a reborn version crafted from three dictionaries and a prayer book that French Jesuit missionaries compiled in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

In this radio piece for WBEZ’s Curious City, I broke down the difficulty in counting homeless children and how each child uncounted results in federal funding denied to communities and services denied to people who need them. Reporting involved multiple interviews with homeless or formerly homeless young people along with culling data from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to Chicago Public Schools.

In this Chicago Reader cover story, I uncovered the mystery of Chicago's first murder, Fort Dearborn interpreter Jean Lalime. Researching declassified War Department communications, I showed the 1812 killing at the hands of “city father” John Kinzie was a politically motivated murder. The story also followed the 206-year journey of Lalime’s body from silenced informant to history museum storage piece.

For Patch.com, AOL’s network of hyperlocal news sites where I served as a local editor from 2010 to 2012, a hilarious and informative look at the Cook County property tax system, which is completely different than the system used in all 101 other Illinois counties. Contains information on assessment and valuation, and unprovoked jabs at the music of James Taylor.

For the Aurora Beacon-News, the story of Marshall Gardner, an early 1900s Aurora corset manufacturer who dedicated his life to proving that the Earth was a hollow sphere populated by a central sun, mammoths and Asians. Research for the story included interviews with experts on Hollow Earth theory, Gardner’s own writings, historic newspaper archives, the works of Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley, and U.S. Patent databases.

Originally for my master’s work for Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism but later published in a condensed form by the Huffington Post, I interviewed Australian Harry Nicolaides inside Bangkok Remand Prison. The story looks at the political backdrop of Harry’s arrest for lèse-majesté, examining how a narrator aside in a self-published novel turned into prison time years later as dueling sides of a Thai political schism tried to curry favor with King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

For the Agence France-Presse Asia-Pacific Bureau out of Bangkok, Thailand, I interviewed sex workers in Bangkok’s Patpong district to see how the 2008 Thai political crisis - including the seizure of the airport by anti-government protesters - were affecting an industry dependent on foreign sex tourists.