Stories and lessons to inspire you in 2026

I spent a summer watching very sick people consider how to die with dignity. This story on medical aid in dying reinforced the idea that I need to capture the humanity of every character who shows up in my work. In this case, that’s because few of them would be alive when this story ran. I interviewed more than a dozen MAID patients for this piece, over about three months, and I was physically with three MAID patients (in their homes) when they died. It was an honor to be with these people, and their loved ones, during this time. Maybe most of all, this story taught me about the power of simply asking a question and then taking time to really listen to the answer. The reporting on this story was an ego-stripping experience that changed my life.

I had such a strange childhood, one both fairy tale and feral. I hoped to convey at least a little of our life as outsiders while also delivering up some surprise ties to political events rocking the country in recent years. It was a challenge to marry those things, and it took some minor acrobatics to pull off in a mid-length feature, but with a lot of revision, I think the story worked in the end. My editor Honor Jones did a wonderful job whittling and reshaping without damaging the rough magic I was aiming for.

With a group of about 50 journalists from all over Europe, we investigated the spread of PFAS or “forever chemicals” as well as the manipulating lobbying tactics of the PFAS industry to avoid restriction on these dangerous chemicals. Over three years, we published two big investigations that broke news all over the continent.

I hadn’t done this sort of properly investigative work before — mostly, I talk to people who want to tell me their stories, rather than spending months trying to extract information from more reluctant, frightened, or even hostile sources. But this one felt important, and personal to me, and I'm glad I put in the time to put it together. It was a demoralizing story to work on in some ways, but I finished with some new tools in my toolkit, and the satisfaction of knowing that I had put something into the public eye that wouldn't likely have been there otherwise.

After 40 or so years as a newspaper writer, it was a thrill to report and write in a new (for me) genre, the podcast. I learned to listen differently, to think of the audience as listeners and not readers, and to collaborate in a way that column-writing doesn’t involve. I’ve always loved stretching the boundaries of what I know and do, and it was especially satisfying to take that stretch in this phase of life.

Anna Sale of “Death Sex & Money” fame came on the show I make with a witch named Rebecca. At the beginning of 2024, Rebecca read a “year ahead spread" for Anna. It's a tarot reading where you get a card for each month, giving you a sense of what the year may feel like for you. Then in 2025, we talked to Anna about her year that was, playing her excerpts from her “year ahead spread,” and reflecting on how her year transpired. I've never made anything like it...and I'm really proud of it. 

I'm proud of this story because it drew attention to something incredibly important — the impact of federal funding cuts on tribal radio stations — and also, to an extent, served to show the unique place those stations had in their communities. I learned a lot about the role of tribal stations in native communities around the country, and the hard, unglamorous work that goes into keeping them going.  

Revealed the remarkable, hidden story of one of America's most famous Black entrepreneurs through a complex family lens. The lesson: it’s hard to make a new narrative show with an all new team on a tight budget!

I'm forcing myself to do more longform writing, something I find incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s happening, and it’s far less terrible than I expected it to be.

This first-person essay was a difficult piece for me to write and departed from the journalistic work I usually do, where I’m centering other people’s voices rather than my own. Turning the lens inward to my own perspective was an uncomfortable but helpful way to re-process the chaos of my earliest journalism job — and a reminder that reporters can also give ourselves permission to mine our own lives and experiences.

An attempt to center Vietnamese people, rather than Americans, for the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon; it was a great exercise in diversity of approaches and voice, and in trying to squeeze this into the purview of The Verge, historically a tech website, I realized that the thing we really do more than talk about gadgets is explain systems.

I really enjoyed getting to tell the story of Emilycc, the streamer in Texas who's been broadcasting herself live on Twitch for three years and counting. My hope was to take what could’ve been this strange sideshow of the new internet and use it to explore — with respect, and without judgment — why so many of us now feel we have to perform so much of our lives online: the loneliness, the anxiety, the yearning to belong. On a lighter note, I learned that interviewing a marathon streamer requires becoming a streamer yourself.

My Ursa podcast co-host Dawnie Walton and I had the privilege of speaking with poet and prose writer Destiny O. Birdsong about navigating censorship and what happens when writers and editors don’t see eye-to-eye. Destiny also discussed the intersections of religion and queerness, the representation of queer sex and sex work in literature, and more.

Two years into the Audio Flux adventure, we’ve finally launched our podcast! We're excited to share the dozens of incredible audio gems, produced by independent producers from all over, even further and wider through the podcast. What have we learned? To stick to our values as the podcast industry swirls around us, and to trust in the collaborative spirit at the heart of Audio Flux. 

Inspired by the discourse around Ozempic, I wrote about my experience as a teenage weight loss counselor.

My story from January uncovered a network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters across the U.S. My reporting confirmed they were all operated by one engineer in NYC who was posing as a local resident in each town. The story inspired follow-up coverage by local and regional outlets in almost a dozen states and kicked off fascinating debates in the news industry about where the line is in journalism between automated aggregation and AI-based theft.

I was just so moved by the story of this man. He tried to kill himself. Now, he's living his life to help others in his small town.

“Point of No Return” is an independently produced documentary series funded by TV3–3Cat, a regional public broadcaster. Despite its modest scale, the English version on YouTube has reached high viewership and earned major international recognition — including an International Emmy Award, a Webby Award, and two Pictures of the Year awards, among others. It proves that powerful storytelling and exclusive access can break through borders, and that even from small media ecosystems it is possible to reach global audiences and achieve worldwide acclaim.

I was so excited and gratified to help bring back the first in-person Society for Features Journalism national conference since the pandemic. We met at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix from Nov. 6-8, 2025, and it was epic. The focus was on craft, camaraderie, education and inspiration with speakers like Pulitzer Prize winners Eli Saslow, Lane DeGregory, Mark Warren and many more. We're already planning our next SFJ conference at the same location in October 2026. Please join us if you can.