In early 2013, I was terrified.

Among other things, I was attempting to write my first book, The Monopolists. And I was training for my first marathon.

For years, I had written and run. But not like this.

It wasn’t until those two daunting things collided that I understood how tangled up they were. Now, I can’t imagine doing one without the other.

Flash forward a decade and I had helped Kara Goucher tell her story, The Longest Race. Readers stood out in the Colorado snow to hear us talk about the book on launch day (thank you). The response has stayed with me.

What a lot of people didn’t realize, though maybe it’s obvious, is how much writing and running, working together, helped both of us tell a hard story.

Turns out we’re not alone. So we’re launching Stride & Story, a weekend retreat for folks who run, write, and want to do both with others who get it.

The question that guided us was simple. “What would our dream weekend look like?” And thanks to Liz Van Voorhis at FIT Collective, we’re finally getting this off the ground.

At the start of the year, one of my goals was “more IRL.” Communicating online has afforded me a lot of conveniences, but the best connections, moments, and breakthroughs of my life have always happened in person. More dinner parties, more movie screenings, more coffee meetups.

And, more running and writing with people worth writing and running alongside.

I finished the marathon and the book. It wasn’t always pretty. It rarely is.

But this time, I’d rather have company.

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Would you risk your life to save someone else’s?

Not as a hypothetical. Not as a dinner party thought experiment. Really. If it came to it, would you?

I found myself in Tirana, Albania, sitting with that question after stumbling onto a chapter of World War II history I’d never encountered.

In 1939, Italian fascists invaded Albania. The country was majority Muslim and home to only a few hundred Jews. Yet Albania exited the war as the only European country with more Jews than when the war began.

The reason comes down to a single word: besa.

Besa is an Albanian code of honor, rooted in culture and, for many, in faith. It holds that when someone is in need, you don’t weigh the cost, you take responsibility for their life. To turn away is not just a moral failure. It’s a profound shame.

At the Bunk’Art 2 Museum, these stories are told through prose accompanied by stunning photos from Norman Gershman. Their portraits document the tailors, teachers, photographers, and neighbors who hid friends, colleagues, and total strangers from Nazi troops. The Veseli family hid seven Jews in a home that the family owned in a village. Destan and Lime Balla dressed three brothers fleeing Germans as farmers and feed them, only to be reunited with them 45 years later. A storekeeper father-son pair, Mefail Bicaku and Niazi Bicaku, hid many people in their barn, secretly shuttling food and provisions and ultimately helping them safely to the border.

The museum itself where Gershman’s work is displayed is part of the story: a literal bunker carved underneath the capital, one remnant of the communist leadership’s Cold War paranoia. Albania has an astonishing 750,000 “sinister gray mushrooms,” as they’ve been called, scattered across the country.

Reading these accounts and walking through the underground passageways, I thought of the film “Secret Lives” by my friend Aviva Slesin that documents hidden children and the families who sheltered them across wartime Europe. What strikes you both in Aviva’s film and in Tirana is the same thing: most of the people who acted didn’t describe it as heroism. Politics or religion may have been part of it, but they were following something more basic – an unshakeable sense of decency.

I’d like to believe I would do the same, as would the people in my life. But I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that this quality, acting rightly not because it’s visible or rewarded, but because it’s right, feels increasingly rare. And increasingly necessary.

***

If you can’t get to Albania, check out Gershman’s work and Aviva’s film. Both are worth your time.

Every investigation has a subject. In Albania’s communist-era, the subject was everyone.

The building where that surveillance was designed and directed in Tirana now welcomes visitors.

The House of Secret Surveillance, known to locals as The House of Leaves, opened with honorable intentions. In 1931, it was built to be the country’s obstetrics clinic. But it was forced to close and during World War II, it served as offices for the Gestapo. From 1944 to 1991, it became the Central Directorate of the communist party’s Secret Service.

Within its walls, bugging, surveillance, internments, torture and spying strategies were organized and refined. Propaganda was published. The Stalinist regime ran on paranoia and a hunger for total control. For years, Albanians heard only whispers, the “rustling of leaves,” about what was happening inside. It wasn’t until after the Berlin Wall fell that their suspicions were confirmed. Today, the building is a museum.

The House of Leaves serves as a sobering reminder of what happens when technology, media, and surveillance tools are weaponized. In the US, a web of laws governs what investigators can do, how recordings must be consented to, and what privacy citizens are owed. Those laws are not perfect, but they’re easy to take for granted until you stand somewhere that had none.

The museum cites a 2014 survey by Eduard Zaloshnja finding that 76 percent of Albanians felt that bugging and spying were used excessively before 1991. Every single respondent either had relatives who were sentenced or executed during the communist era or had personally experienced political persecution, such as deportation or confinement.

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The scale is staggering. In a country of roughly 1 million people in 1945 and about 3 million in 1990, around 18,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons, according to the museum. More than 5,500 were executed, with or without trial.

The surveillance state turned its “investigative” machinery inward, against its own people, seeking power rather than truth. It’s a perverse inversion of detective fiction: in noir, the investigator uncovers guilt. Here, the guilt was assigned first, truth irrelevant.

The state also exploited an informant problem. Neighbors reported neighbors. Investigations depend on sources, but what’s the moral line between a source and an informant? One serves truth, the other serves power. The difference matters.

Some countries run from their history. Given the scale of devastation that happened here, that impulse is understandable. Albania has chosen otherwise. Journalists and investigators live and die by documentation, and the museum is full of it – files, dossiers, intercepted letters and diagrams.

But layered into the archive are harder, haunting questions: what happens when a state collapses? Who protects the records? Who decides what gets preserved, and what disappears? How is the story told?

The rustling of leaves, it turns out, was the sound of a building keeping records, some of which are now on display.

I’m glad that the files survived. The regime didn’t.

I’m thrilled to share some wonderful news! The documentary short I directed, “Screw Lucy” will be officially premiering at the Florida Film Festival!

Directing this film has been such a labor of love and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have its first public screening not far from where the story transpired 40 years ago.

The film follows Lucy Morgan, a local homemaker-turned-journalist who exposed the truth about a charismatic local sheriff in Pasco County. Her reporting revealed dark secrets involving the mob, drugs, and trafficking of local children. Despite facing nonstop harassment and death threats, Lucy persevered, becoming one of the first women to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

If you’re in or around Orlando, please join us Saturday, April 18th, at 2:30 PM @ Regal Winter Park Village (Theater A).

You can find the whole lineup for the festival here. And a trailer for “Screw Lucy” here.

A huge shoutout to the dream team on this one: producers Dan Erdman and Seth Porges, editor Blake Gingerich, director of photography David Allen, composer Kate Simko, and our animation partners, Chiba. And, of course, the Nonfiction Hotlist.

I’ve spent years digging into the hidden history of board games. The lawsuits, the stolen credits, the cultural fingerprints left on cardboard and plastic.

And I’m thrilled to share my latest piece for The Wall Street Journal’s USA250 series. It’s part of the paper’s year-long reflection on 250 years of American capitalism.

The piece traces two centuries of American board games, from a small cartography firm in New York publishing the country’s very first homegrown game in 1822, all the way to the crowdfunded indie hits filling shelves today. It started out as a story about games but it turned into something else about who we are, what we’re afraid of, and what we keep pretending is within reach.

Some of what I found was delightful. Some of it made me wince. The same era that gave children wholesome moral fables also gave us games like Marriage Auction, where a bride’s worth was literally printed out on a card. The same Gilded Age anxiety that made Horatio Alger a household name also incubated Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game, known today as Monopoly.

That’s the thing about games. They’re honest in a way people rarely are. The Cold War gave us Risk. Postwar suburbia gave us a shinier version of the Game of Life, complete with plastic cars and a finish line called Millionaire Acres. We think we’re just playing. We never are.

Read the full piece here and all of the WSJ’s USA250 series here.

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Getting my private investigator license started as a joke.

Then it became a hobby.

And now, it’s…kind of a thing.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed a pattern in my inbox. Sometimes multiple times a week, someone reaches out asking some version of the same question: “Wait…How does someone actually become a licensed private investigator?”

As more people have asked, I’ve realized that it says something about where we’re at collectively, particularly those of us in film, journalism, or other media-adjacent fields in flux.

So, I wrote a guide. I didn’t overthink the title, “How to Become a Licensed Private Investigator.”

I pulled together the questions I get most often, the lessons I learned from my own licensing process, the realities of the work, and the things I wish that someone had told me earlier. I try to be practical but also honest about the weirdness and delight that come with it all.

For those who are in transition or simply PI-curious, I hope that this is useful. Not because I think everyone needs to become a private investigator, but because I think it’s worth considering alternative paths, asking questions, and appreciating the art of deep research.

Keep the questions coming. They’re what sparked all of this in the first place.

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I stumbled into this NY Times Travel story about hotels with odd backstories the way that I often do: by accident.

While looking for something unrelated on the Oregon Historical Society’s website, I came across information they had about how my home state led in the “social hygiene movement” of the World War I era.

What is today McMenamins Edgefield, a hotel, brewery, spa and golf course in Troutdale, Ore., was once the Cedars, a detention center for women suspected of carrying sexually transmitted diseases.

Wait, what?

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Oregon led in what became a nationally disturbing public health history that was news to me. As panic gripped the country over soldiers contracting sexually transmitted infections, authorities rounded up thousands of women around the country. Often without due process. Often without proof. Sometimes for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Cedars closed in 1923 after Ruth Brown, a Black woman, successfully sued for her freedom and the negative press became untenable. But that history—layers of it, really, from “poor farm” to military academy to elder care facility—all sits beneath the surface of what’s now a charming hotel where people celebrate anniversaries and enjoy weekend getaways.

That contradiction fascinated me. How do we transform spaces with dark histories? Should we? And who else is doing it?

Turns out, quite a few hotels are banking on their bizarre, sometimes disturbing pasts. I found properties built in former prisons, cult compounds, defunct military installations, even a fake cancer hospital run by a millionaire con artist.

Some lean hard into the spooky factor (with ghost tours and murder mystery weekends). Others preserve their architecture and history with more reverence, turning mental hospitals designed by Frederick Law Olmsted into spaces that honor both the suffering and the progressive vision of their founders.

I still think about those women at the Cedars. Now, at least, when I’m back at a McMenamins with a beer in hand, I’ll be thinking about them, too.

NY Times story

Images from OHS, Hotels

After years of writing about and covering sports, I’m worried about what’s happening to girls’ and women’s access. That’s why I’ve joined the board of Girls on the Run Los Angeles.

I was lucky. Title IX had already opened doors by the time I grew up. Girls’ sports were expanding. The idea that physical activity was “just for boys” was finally being challenged. Running became my refuge in middle school, my therapy in high school, my constant companion through college and beyond.

But here’s what mattered most: discovering that my body was strong. That I could set goals and achieve them. That I belonged on the track, on the trail, anywhere I wanted to be. Those lessons shaped everything—my career confidence, my willingness to take risks, my belief that I deserved space in the world.

Every girl deserves that feeling. Every girl deserves to know her own strength.

Girls on the Run Los Angeles serves school-age girls across Los Angeles County, many from communities where resources are scarce and opportunities limited. Between wildfires, ICE raids, and budget cuts, it’s been a devastating year for many of the families this organization serves.

These girls can’t wait for the political winds to shift. They need champions now. They need programs that affirm their worth and build their confidence. They need adults who believe in their potential and will invest in their futures.

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What drew me to this organization isn’t just the running, though as someone who still laces up regularly, that resonates. It’s their approach to empowerment. The program uses running to teach life skills: goal-setting, teamwork, healthy relationship building, and community service.

Girls must know that they can advocate for themselves. That their worth isn’t determined by others’ opinions. The joy and power of physical strength. How to practice using their voices before the stakes get higher.

Right now, conversations are happening in boardrooms and legislative chambers that could roll back decades of progress for girls and women in sports. Programs are losing funding. Opportunities are disappearing.

Joining this board isn’t just about giving back. It’s about recognizing that the girl I was, the one who found her strength running north on Interstate 5, exists in thousands of young women across Los Angeles. My opportunities were built on the advocacy and investment of people who came before me. Now it’s my turn to extend that ladder.

I hope that you’ll join me.

Donate here.

Images from GOTRLA.

I found myself catching a big case of the feels as I stood on a high school football field in Gardena, Calif.

I was there reporting for this New York Times Opinion piece (online here or in last Sunday’s print edition). Dozens of middle school girls were lining up and running flag football drills — and having a blast doing it. Moms, dads, and grandpas stood on the sidelines offering encouragement.

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Flag football for girls and women is on a rapid ascent and it’s one that I think is worth celebrating. It brings the best of tackle (strategy, teamwork, fun) without the worst (head injuries). This story was an unofficial sequel to my reporting on the efforts to grow women’s professional tackle football and ongoing debate about safety in the sport.

Why was something seemingly so normal as a football practice getting to me?

I think it was wondering what the world would have looked like if flag had been offered seriously when I was in school.

Growing up, football took up a lot of space psychically and logistically. (It still does.) My dad played and so did my brother. The family calendar revolved around Duck football schedules. The NFL still dominates pop culture, TV schedules and rakes in billions.

But the message to me and all girls was very clear — the best you literally can do is stand on the sidelines.

That’s changing now. Flag is having a moment.

And, as the kids would say, I’m here for it.

Reading the election headlines in the summer of 2016, I found myself asking a Freudian question.

What’s the deal with Trump’s mom?

I wasn’t covering the campaign. My sights were fixed on the Olympics in Rio. But Trump was intensely focused on two groups – women and immigrants.

I’d heard the lore of Fred Trump’s empire building, but his mom was invisible. For someone running for president, there was practically nothing about her.

On June 24, 2016, the New Yorker published what would be one of the odder scoops of my career, the story of Trump’s mother, an immigrant maid who worked in elite homes. She came from deep poverty in Scotland as a young woman, settled in New York City, met Fred Trump, then largely hid her origin story from the rest of the world, draped in furs, pearls and a Mister Softee swirl of hair.

Nine years later, I think about that story more than I ever imagined.

But how it came about may surprise you.

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Step One: Start With What You Know

Today, Google reveals plenty about Mary Trump. But in 2016, there was nothing.

It’s easy for all of us to forget that there is a lot of information that’s not on the internet.

As I’m searching, I’m constantly asking myself, what am I not finding? Why?

The one thing I did find was a very brief NYT obituary from August 19, 2000, for Mary Trump.

Step Two: Work the Document

Obituaries are research gold. Even Mary Trump’s short one listed names, dates, places, and associations. This part grabbed me:

Mrs. Trump was born Mary MacLeod on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland on May 10, 1912. On a visit to New York City in the 1930s, she met Fred C. Trump.

Born in Scotland? The Isle of Lewis? A “visit” to New York?

Step Three: To the Library

Armed with names and dates, I headed to the New York Public Library. Most libraries offer free subscriptions to Ancestry.com, one of the more stunning databases in human history. Ancestry has digitized millions of archival US Census records, ship manifests, wedding, birth, and death certificates. A kind librarian can even help you in your search.

I punched in Mary’s married and maiden names. Primary source documents appeared, as well as family trees others had uploaded. Using Google Drive, I built out an archive, organizing documents as I found them. A skeletal timeline of her life began to form.

I build a timeline for just about every project. They bring order to chaos and inherently a story takes shape.

Step Four: Context

As I found out facts specific to Mary Trump, bigger questions emerged. What was it like to be in Scotland in the 1920s? What was life like in the Isle of Lewis? How did she immigrate to the US when immigration quotas were tight?

NYPL’s stacks held books about Scottish history, immigration patterns, as well as archival newspaper reports. Some of those authors I called up and spoke to either on or off the record for context about how her life fit into a larger narrative.

Step Five: Bulletproofing Documents

I assumed (rightly) that I would have no access to the Trump campaign, so I wanted to ensure my documents were lined up and accurate. The great thing about this story, and a fair amount of investigative work, is everything was public record. I never had to get on a campaign bus, beg for an interview, or even do a FOIA request.

This story was broken open in a wildly unsexy manner. It was thanks to documents, librarians, and conversations with deeply nerdy subject matter experts.

Final Thoughts:

With newsrooms contracting, I’d encourage folks to draw on these resources more themselves. The process itself is fun, but it also reveals the layers that we all live upon.

For all of AI’s strengths, I have a hard time believing that it could have cracked this one, or at least to the New Yorker’s journalistic standards. There’s an intoxication to AI, the idea that all of the world’s knowledge is at one’s fingertips. They’re incredible tools. But the excavation of something new, bringing the analog and original to an audience (online)--that’s the magic. Bringing things forward that are new, interesting, and may, in this case, illuminate international policy.

It’s difficult to get history stories pitched in newsrooms, as it’s often dismissed as “old news.” That’s true, they are.

But let’s stop saying that like it’s bad.

We all sit as dots on bigger timelines.

While our lives differed wildly, I worked as a nanny in New York while I was in college and related a lot to Mary’s experience of being far from home, being paid little while being surrounded by decadence, and then bizarrely finding herself in a surreally different life.

I wonder what she would make of her offspring today.

Like Trump, and most Americans, my ancestors came to this country from far away and worked strenuous jobs so that I could have the privileged life I live today.

He wouldn’t be here if his mother and grandparents hadn’t immigrated here.

My Freudian question led me to many answers. And many more questions.

There was the stunt pilot from Macon, Georgia, who risked her life over British skies.

There was the 24-year-old relative novice who hoped to parlay her pilot gig into a bigger career in business or politics.

There was the party girl, eager for an adventure.

“Their former identities didn’t seem to matter,” Becky Aikman writes in her new book, Spitfires. “In England, they invented new ones.”

There were 25 of them and when they headed to England in 1942, they became the first-ever American women to command military aircraft.

What struck me about these women’s stories is that these women received no warm welcome. The Allies were so desperate for help, they were willing to consider women pilots. Change came out of necessity, not from the kindness of their hearts.

There's a familiar pattern here—one that echoes "A League of Their Own." Men allowed women into a new field during wartime, then after the war ended, tried to shove them back out of it. And for 60 years, these stories were largely ignored.

This reveals something important about how change actually happens. Those who hold power aren't typically seeking progress or inclusion—they're acting from far more basic and primal motives. The history is so often rewritten, or in this case, simply not told.

Aikman’s prose is engaging and pace-driven, reminiscent of Erik Larson, Michael Lewis, or Patrick Radden Keefe’s fantastic nonfiction work. Her research excavates information that feels staggeringly fresh and revealing, bringing these stories into the forefront, where they belong.

Join us in Pasadena

If you’re in the LA area, come to Vroman’s Bookstore (695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA) on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm. I’ll be interviewing Becky about her years of research and fascinating work on this book.

You can preorder the book here.

Ping me with any questions you have for Becky ahead of time.

When it published back in 2015, I had no idea that a decade later, I’d still be talking about the once-secret history of a board game.

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For those in Colorado, mark your calendars for Thursday, May 29, as I’ll be speaking at the Denver Press Club at 6:30 pm. (Please purchase tickets ahead of time, as space is limited.)

I still love any excuse to share this story of this game, even if it’s the 1,000th time. (If you’re interested in being 1,001, you can send any speaking inquiries here. I also emcee tournaments.) It feels like reconvening with an old friend and after years of research, I’m excited that anyone but my dog seems interested. I had no idea that my audiences would range from school kids, to investigative reporters, to housing policy wonks, to lawyers, to women’s groups, and beyond.

Ahead of the Denver event, here are some of the most frequently asked questions and answers I’ve received over the years.

• Wasn’t Monopoly invented by a dude in the Great Depression? No! It was invented by a woman in the early 1900s, Lizzie Magie! And she invented it, in part, to teach people about the evils of capitalism. Irony abounds.

• That’s crazy! Why don’t we know anything about her? Because she died in obscurity in 1948, then Parker Brothers denied she ever invented the game. And it was only because of an unlikely series of events, including a 1970s lawsuit from an economics professor in the Bay Area, Ralph Anspach, that we know any of this. All of that, on top of the incredible headwinds a female inventor faced in creating a game about politics at a time when she couldn’t even vote.

  

• Are you any good at playing it? I enjoy it, but I’m no Simone Biles of Monopoly or anything.

• What token do you play as? As a kid, I was the dog. But I’m not a purist and these days I’ll try and play as the iron, thimble or something I think is potentially under threat.

• How do I get better at destroying my friends and family at the game? A good place to start is by following the actual rules of the game, which staggeringly, many people do not.

• Does writing a book about Monopoly end all rule arguments in your family? No, because even with time and books, I’m still the little sister and the youngest of my eight cousins. Sigh. (Love you, fam!)

• Can you tell me how much my family’s game is worth? No, I’m not an appraiser. I’ve watched enough episodes of “Hoarders” to be generally skeptical that our garages contain junk that will put kids through college.

• What has surprised you most about the history of Monopoly? As a longtime newsroom creature, it’s amazing to me how misinformation can stick around for generations. The truth can come out, but it’s often a very long and messy process. I also overlooked how the boards themselves are cultural artifacts that can serve as windows into a time in place, including the nation’s history of redlining. And, how more than a century later, Hasbro (which acquired Parker Brothers) still can’t admit that a woman invented Monopoly.

• So, what’s your next project about? Clue? No, and I don’t know why 10 years later and many books, films, articles and podcasts later, people still think this is a good joke. But after 10 years, I finally succumbed.

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Art from the amazing Roz Chast.

About halfway through last year, I found myself in a familiar creative grind–pitching documentaries, TV shows, books, podcasts– the full spectrum of nonfiction storytelling.

Yet little to nothing seemed to stick.

If you work in a creative field, pitching yourself and asking for money is part of the job. Rejection becomes your constant companion. It’s surprisingly similar to selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door, each knock requiring fresh courage.

But something felt different this time. Was I just getting bad at my job? Was I targeting the wrong audiences? The crickets were deafening.

I started asking my friends in the industry – directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, executives – what’s up? Are you guys, like, working?

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The answer, overwhelmingly: NO.

When the WGA strike ended in the fall of 2023, there was an expectation of returning to business as usual.

That never materialized. Even before the election, before our current market turbulence, the entertainment industry had slipped into a recession, if not depression. (See exhibits A, B, C, etc.) Digging deeper revealed uncomfortable truths–colleagues surviving on family money (those fortunate enough to have it), cobbling together gigs to make rent, or simply treading water while maintaining a facade that everything was fine.

It’s not. And acknowledging that there’s no shame in struggling to navigate your career during seismic industry shifts feels important.

I’m not sure how this upheaval resolves, but I know that in any crisis, there can be creativity and innovation. (I, of all people, am very aware the Gilded Age gave us Monopoly.)

Enter: the Nonfiction Hotlist.

For years, Hollywood has embraced the Blacklist, a remarkable ranking of the year’s best unproduced screenplays. It’s helped bring attention to writers and projects that are incredible, but often far from landing on our screens.

Similar in spirit, the Nonfiction Hotlist emerged to showcase the best documentary projects that are still incubating. I heard about it when veteran producer and overall smart guy Adam Neuhaus posted about it on LinkedIn.

They received 639 submissions and I was honored to have one of mine – SCREW LUCY – a documentary short about a trailblazing investigative reporter Lucy Morgan in Florida in the 1980s on the list.

The complete list (available here) humbled me. The caliber of both projects and creators behind them was nothing short of extraordinary.

My inbox has runneth over with people who are eager to help us make SCREW LUCY to life–developments I’ll share more about soon. It’s clear to me how the Nonfiction Hotlist is bringing together extraordinary creators who are eager to collaborate and work as a team to get these stories out into the world. It’s invigorating to have an injection of that roll-up-our-sleeves energy and learn from others who are trying to solve similar puzzles to my own. Heck, I even landed a new recruit to my book club.

In the meantime, explore the Nonfiction Hotlist and champion the kind of entertainment that you want to see. (I know I’m dying to see the grit of Erin’s Law, the fascinating world of competitive Hula and animated mind of Oliver Sacks, among others.)

All of it leaves me wondering, what are the other ways we can rally and build community in the midst of chaos?

I’ll be at my desk, contemplating this over Samoas and Thin Mints if anyone needs me.

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If you write a book about Monopoly, the joke that many people make — and they always think that they’re the first — is along the lines of, “So, what’s your next one about? Clue?”

Like any stubborn board game journalist, I sat on the idea for a good 10-15 years. But finally, thanks to the brand new Switchboard Magazine, I have finally been able to delve into the wild and mysterious history of the board game.

Clue came out of World War II, as Anthony Pratt and his wife, Elva, tried to devise a way to have fun during the blackouts in Birmingham.

But what jolted me, when I started looking into archival stories about Pratt, were reports that he, the inventor of Clue, had gone missing.

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I wanted to know, what happened to Pratt? How and why did he invent the game? Why have it origins been so overlooked? I delved into patents, ship manifests, British historical society records, and even tracked down some relatives who were kind enough to share stories of their families with me.

There ended up being some Agatha Christiesque twists and turns revealing how the game would end up having real-life consequences for DNA and crime solving, as well.

Congrats to Celia Aniskovich and her team on the launch! Be sure to sign up for Switchboard’s mailing list and check out the other stories, including features on barefoot hockey, amazing excavations from hidden archives, and a fascinating larceny yarn, among other gems.

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Tuesday night, my boyfriend and I stood on our roof in Brentwood and saw not just plumes of smoke coming from the Palisades, but large flames erupting from the hills. It reminded me of the final scene in “Fight Club,” when Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter are staring out the window, seeing buildings collapse all around them as the Pixies play.

The irony, to be in the heart of the entertainment industry, and know that it isn’t fake.

Now the Whole Foods near us is fully stocked and open for business. Yogis roll out their mats at local studios. Trash is picked up. We sit by our phones waiting for alerts and are in constant communication with friends and family, many of whom have left the city. Others have lost their homes and all of their worldly possessions. At least one friend went to work Tuesday morning and didn’t even get the chance to evacuate; everything he owns is gone. There’s ash everywhere (see above).

The loss of a home is a particular type of grief. It’s the physical space where memories are made.

As we received notice that we were in the “evacuation warning zone,” meaning fire officials were instructing us to pack our things up, we had the luxury of time so many people we know didn’t.

Obviously, we’d load up our car with people and pets. But when it came to stuff, the question we were asking ourselves wasn’t, “What do we own that’s most valuable?”

It was, “What do we have that is irreplaceable?”

The things I grabbed surprised me. They weren’t the most expensive things that I own. But I couldn’t fathom leaving without them — they felt beyond the purview of an insurance assessor.

I have a fireproof safety deposit box (not in our home) where jewelry and hard drives backing up my projects live. It was weirdly hard to find one a year ago, but I can’t stress enough how comforting it was this week to know that it was safe, as well as most of my family photos and heirlooms, which are stored out-of-state. AND in the cloud. Wherever you live, use this moment to BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT PHOTOS, DOCUMENTS, AND FILES.

Most of the family photos in my home are digital reproductions. Please digitize all that you can. Help your older relatives do the same. It was a tedious project in downsizing our family home and decluttering in 2020, but in a world of climate disasters, knowing what matters, where it is, and how it’s stored has taken on a new meaning for me.

Here’s what I grabbed from my home this week and I’d encourage everyone to do an emotional stuff audit.

Not only is it a more emotional way of Marie Kondo’ing, but it has increased my empathy for those who have lost. It isn’t “just stuff” people have lost.

My handwritten notebooks. I’m an impassioned believer in journaling. I’ve done a daily word dump, sometimes just a few minutes per day, since I was a kid. It’s the single most powerful tool of self-reflection I know of. My older ones are archived elsewhere, but to lose the last couple years of my memories would feel like being zapped with a Men In Black pen.

My mother’s Shakespeare volume. In the years after my mother’s passing, I found myself clinging to her handwriting. It became a powerful connection to how I actually remembered her, be it mundane Post-Its about leftovers in the refrigerator, loving edits on a high school English essay, or outlines for papers she never lived to write. After she died, I found a volume of Shakespeare that she had as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon and I love leafing through it to see not only what she thought of the “Romeo and Juliet” (“Juliet matures much faster than Romeo”), but as a window into a time long before I was born. It’s sat on or near my desk since college, also as a symbol of the access to education I know she and generations of women before fought so hard for me to access. Similarly, her dictionary and a couple of psychology books she taught made it into the car.

Paintings from friends and family. I’m lucky enough to have friends who paint. I also had an Aunt Zola who made this odd landscape. I can’t replace those works. My boyfriend also grabbed a small ceramic pot that I thought he took because I know it’s rare, but he said he took it because his late grandmother gave it to him. It isn’t just the thing, but the reminder of someone intending it for you.

A ticket stub from the concert where I met David Bowie. Sure, no one takes the memory away from you. But in an age void of ticket stubs, this Cameron Crowe-like memory felt all the more precious.

My Locked Filing Cabinet. The cabinet I don’t care about, but inside are documents, papers, as well as Polaroids and other things that either would be hard or a pain in the but to replace.

What was stunning to me is how much I truly didn’t care about or could easily replace – a Peloton! My Vitamix! The Dyson. All things that I use every day and am grateful for making my life smoother, but at the end of the day, can be replaced.

On the surface, it sounds like a trite exercise or stale first date question — “What would you take if your house burns down?”

But I found value in giving it a think and hope you will, too.

WAYS TO HELP:

• The MALAN Fire & Wind Storm Resource spreadsheet.

• Altadena Girls – restoring normalcy for teenage girls impacted by the fires.

• A list of brands providing products and deals to the displaced.

There’s a game that I used to play when I hosted dinner parties at my place in Brooklyn.

When someone new arrived, I’d ask them to survey the room. “Someone in here has done time in a prison for crimes that made international news. Can you guess who? ”

In 10 years, no one ever guessed correctly — my friend, Kari Ferrell, a.k.a. “the Hipster Grifter”.

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This week, after many years of work, Kari’s memoir, “You’ll Never Believe Me,” comes out. I was honored to provide a blurb – the galley blew me away.

Since Kari first made headlines in 2009, the true crime boom crescendoed. Con artists, especially female ones, are media sensations. But seldom do we hear their stories firsthand, up close, with raw honesty.

It wasn’t long after she served time that Kari moved back to New York and, at a night of East Village karaoke, we were introduced through mutual media friends I had made as a Gawker.com (RIP) intern.

Gawker and Kari’s stories were interlinked, as the New York gossip site covered her rise and fall closely, helping make her a counterculture icon of the New York media scene. Her face appeared on posters taped to dive bar walls, her nickname buzzed in office water cooler chatter. In recession-era New York, even though Kari had confessed to scamming friends and family out of thousands of dollars, her targeting of unsuspecting dudes in the Brooklyn scene made her something of a Robin Hood-y antihero.

(Only in New York can a nerdy Wall Street Journal reporter who interviewed billionaires befriend one of the most notorious scammers in town.)

And one of the many things that surprised me about Kari, and I say this with love, is she was incredibly normcore.

She lived in Williamsburg with her military veteran husband, Elliot. They had a dog. She didn’t drink. She worked an office job and loved reading, even becoming an advocate of my book club. She tirelessly volunteered her time to causes she cared about.

Over the years, I got the sense that she was a really good person who maybe messed up in her past. (Who hasn’t, to some degree or another?) But she seemed determined to build a meaningful life for herself, one day at a time.

I’ve interviewed people in and out of prison. I’ve meant some good people who screwed up. I’ve sat across from some truly violent psychopaths. There are people who do horrible things and aren’t sorry that they hurt people, they’re sorry that they got caught. We love a clean redemption story, but it’s seldom that simple.

Then, there’s Kari. Seeing her memoir pages come together, it forced me to think, who gets second chances? What do people do with them?

One of the things that Kari’s story is a testament to is “doing the work.” Her book focuses on the depths of therapy sessions, tough conversations, and the act of writing her story itself, as a means to not just revisit her story, but confront it in all its brutality. Not in a bumper sticker woo way, but in those more difficult What the hell have I done? moments.

Born in South Korea, Kari was adopted as an infant by a Mormon family in Utah. As she writes, many people in her orbit growing up were well intended, but being non-white and queer, she felt was “wrong” and “I could feel it in my bones.”

Familiar rites of passage – the awkwardness of sexual education classes in puberty, the thrill of shoplifting from a Wal-Mart, cutting class – are seen through the lens of a kid who lost her way, rooted in a deeper sense of self-hatred. By 17, “I was running away from bridges I had lit on fire with the explosive combination of shame and resentment (for everyone, for myself), and with the awareness that I was spiraling and needed to get the fuck out.”

So, she begins to steal. From friends, family, romantic partners.

“I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes, “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.”

When I first read that sentence, I felt the air leave my body. It’s devastating. And, I believe it to be honest. It’s the primal desire for attention, to be seen, even if for messed-up reasons.

There’s a self awareness that she brings to behavior that she, herself, describes as repugnant. It’s interwoven with the psychology of wanting to be loved, identity and coming of age, as well as raising questions about what it means to occupy space.

“Sex, blackmail, and collusion were weapons I frequently pulled out of the arsenal,” she writes. But there’s a recognition that before she hurt others, she felt hurt herself.

She doesn’t ask for forgiveness or pity. In fact, some of the greatest tension in her story comes years after she’s grifted up a storm. Will she get “outed” at her new job? What will happen when she travels to South Korea? Who gets forgiven and why?

Memoir is a deceptive genre. There’s a lot of schlock and self-puffery out there, faux vulnerability that’s hunting for a movie deal or speaking tour.

But to actually delve into the soul — and share it with the world — that’s brave. Particularly, if you’ve done unsavory things.

The memoir that is my North Star here is the late, great David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun.” One’s past becomes fodder for not mere recaps, but for digging deep, as stomach-churning as that can be. Facts aren’t static, rather our relationship to them changes every time we pick one up and examine it in light.

The privilege of getting to know someone like Carr or Kari, the emotional diggers among us, up close, you don’t see the cartoon character of a media personality — you see a human being. To be able to translate that to a page and share it, I think that’s the best of what story can do.

Kari says she has authored her “truth as best I can,” she writes. “But maybe you’ll never believe me.”

Indeed. And maybe the next time you’re at a gathering, consider that the guest list may have more to it than meets the eye.

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Twas was the night before Christmas Eve, and I found myself heading to the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.

Presidential libraries are fascinating jewel cases of history, archival documents, and, in the case of Nixon, paraphernalia like his bowling ball, the house built by his father he was built in, and actual ping pong paddles tied to his famed trip to China and diplomacy efforts. (Apparently, President John Tyler’s has a ghost.)

Nixon, one of America’s most complex political figures, presents a unique challenge for any museum. The Nixon Library must balance the task of archiving primary sources on an iconic scandal with telling the story of a Quaker kid from rural California’s orange groves who rose to the White House. If Watergate happened today, it’s hard to imagine it would last more than a couple of cable news cycles.

But who was Nixon beyond Watergate?

Part of the answer I found towards the back of the museum, where a photo of a young Richard Nixon in a football uniform caught my eye. Nixon loved football, though by his own admission, he wasn’t very good at it.

Nixon was “rarely sent in to play,” a museum placard noted, “but he always showed up.”

Nixon’s love for football extended into his political career. In 1968, he even considered adding Vince Lombardi to his ticket…until he discovered that Lombardi was a Democrat. Football analogies peppered Nixon’s notebooks, and NFL blackouts even made their way into the Nixon tapes.

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At Whittier College, the museum noted, Nixon was coached by Wallace Joe “Chief” Newman, a former football and baseball player at the University of Southern California. Newman had played in the 1923 Rose Bowl, the Trojans’ first appearance. He was a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and the Mission Creek Bands of Mission Indians. Jim Thorpe fans know that Native Americans played a critical role in developing football into what we know today; among other things Thorpe was the first NFL commissioner.

Nixon said that he admired Newman more than “any man I have ever known aside from my father,” according to The New York Times.

His influence went beyond giving Nixon years’ worth of sports metaphors or lessons in teamwork—skills Nixon wielded politically, for better or worse. The museum credits Newman’s mentorship with inspiring Nixon’s support for Native American affairs, including advocating for tribal self-rule, increasing the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget, and securing funding for water rights and health care.

As I read about this, I couldn’t help but think that Nixon, like all of us, is a human bucket of contradictions.

Fueled in part by paranoia, he secretly taped people while also having the foresight and will to increase the number of women in leadership positions. On those tapes, he invoked racist tropes while also increasing funding for Historically Black Universities. He headed up a party that today is trying to crush the very things – the Environmental Protection Act and Endangered Species Act – that Nixon created.

It’s easy to see things in black or white, good or bad, a binary organization of the world. Yet we often still have a hard time holding multiple truths, all at once.

While I’m not spearheading the Nixon Fan Club anytime soon, looking at his archives, the primary sources that comprise his life and legacy, including the artifacts of his youth sports career, it’s yet another plea for the case of nuance.

Because Nixon’s sports career ended up having a far greater impact — his signing into law Title IX.

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I attended a screening of the new documentary Sugarcane on Monday and haven’t stopped thinking about it.

In a year when many films are profiles of celebrities talking about how hard it is to be a celebrity, Sugarcane stands out as a stark reminder of the power and potency of investigative techniques on screen.

Directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, Sugarcane follows NoiseCat as he learns more about unmarked graves that were discovered on the grounds of a Catholic-run Indian residential school that members of his family attended. The school, St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia, was one of hundreds that operated in the United States and in Canada, in the name of “re-educating” and “assimilating” Indigenous children. The last one closed in 1997.

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While I won’t get into the details or reveal plot spoilers, I can say this — the film’s masterful investigative storytelling lays bare the intergenerational trauma inflicted by this system; including sexual assault, child abuse, and infanticide. Through NoiseCat’s interactions with his family and friends, especially his father, the human toll of these schools is seen literally up close, as it should be. NoiseCat is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie.

An oft-repeated maxim of investigative work is, “It’s never just the crime, it’s the cover up.”

Even though the hard evidence is there, many governments and the Catholic Church still refuse to disclose documentation that could provide legal and emotional answers to survivors and their families of St. Joseph’s and other schools.

In the face of such stonewalling, the filmmakers do the investigative work themselves. They delve into documents, cast a deep and wide net in interviewing sources, ask probing questions, and think critically about evidence. Perhaps one of the more harrowing pieces exposed by the film are the initials and dates carved into the school’s walls by the students decades ago. It’s an old-fashioned physical clue about who was actually there, as well as an emotionally devastating detail.

But there’s another layer to the investigation to the story, one of a more insidious form of cover-up at play. It’s easy to distance ourselves from stories like St. Joseph’s and view them in a sepia-toned, faraway lens. To look away and say that we weren’t responsible, it was a long time ago, and so on.

What Sugarcane does so powerfully is not just lift the history to the foreground, but show the resilience and impact on people now, which should matter to everyone today. We’re in the room as St. Joseph’s students, now adults, seek justice from Pope Francis, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We see the heaps of records that archivists painstakingly comb through and are with researchers as they guide the elderly through the fields of unmarked graves, trying to hone their searches. We see the tears and strained conversations as survivors work to share their firsthand accounts and relate them to loved ones and the public.

I understand that the idea of sitting down to watch a heavy film isn’t an easy sell these days. I get it – there’s epic burnout and heaps of terrible news.

But I’d argue that it’s a small price to pay compared to what has been endured by those who lived it firsthand.

The film is streaming on NatGeo and on Hulu. You can find out more and watch the trailer here. It’s worth your time.

Photo Credit: Emily Kassie, Christopher LaMarca, Sugarcane Film LLC

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When Kate Warne walked into Allan Pinkerton’s Chicago office in 1856, she was met with skepticism.

Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant and founder of America’s first private detective agency, was used to hiring men to hunt down train robbers, counterfeiters, and thieves. A female detective wasn’t just unheard of – it was unimaginable.

It’s unclear precisely how Warne, a widow from New York, overcame Pinkerton’s skepticism, but she landed the job. Before women’s suffrage or female police officers, she became the first female private investigator in the United States.

A Southern Belle with a Secret

Warne’s genius came in knowing that invisibility could be used as a weapon. Due to prevailing sexism, no one would suspect her, making her a natural for undercover intelligence gathering.

When Pinkerton’s agency became responsible for Abraham Lincoln’s protection during the Civil War, Warne infiltrated pro-Confederate circles by posing as a Southern belle from Alabama. By charming her way into conversations with the wives and sisters of plotters, she gathered crucial intelligence on their plans to assassinate Lincoln ahead of his March 1861 inauguration.

Her work helped Pinkerton’s team devise a plan that redirected Lincoln away from the assassins. The investigators snuck Lincoln onto an overnight train and he posed as Warne’s “invalid brother” with Warne accompanying him as his “caregiver.”

Lincoln arrived safely in Washington, D.C., early the next morning. The plot was thwarted.

Warne’s restless night inspired the Pinkerton Agency’s slogan “We Never Sleep.” Pinkerton’s logo, a watchful eye, is even rumored to have coined the term “private eye.”

Kicking Ass During Reconstruction

Warne’s success prompted Pinkerton to establish an entire department of female detectives. She recruited, trained and continued to investigate herself throughout the Civil War and beyond. Often disguised as Southern lady sympathizers, Warne and her squad gathered invaluable counterintelligence, leading to the arrests of murders, bank robbers, and other scalawags.

“She was a brilliant conversationalist when so disposed,” Pinkerton wrote, “And could be quite vivacious.” Pinkerton also could deal a backhanded compliment that further underscores the sexism of the time. “But she also understood that rarer quality in womankind, the art of being silent.”

Despite such attitudes, Warne’s career paved the way for other female investigators like Hattie Lawton, Cora Strayer, and countless others, including, well, me.

A Sub Rosa Legacy

Warne died young, only in her mid-thirties, succumbing to pneumonia in 1868.

For more than a century, her legacy remained largely hidden, much like the covert work she excelled at. But today, Warne is the subject of a Brad Meltzer book about the plot to kill Lincoln and reportedly the subject of a forthcoming biopic.

In addition to investigating mysteries, Warne became one herself. In examining her story, it’s hard not to only admire her courage, but also be reminded that sometimes the best detectives are those no one sees coming. And heroes can often be hidden in plain sight.

Warne is buried in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery. Pinkerton is beside her.

Recommended reading:

“The Spy of the Rebellion” by Allan Pinkerton

“Kate Warne, Private Detective,” National Park Service ‘

“Celebrating Women’s History: America’s First Female P.I.,” by Erin Allen, Library of Congress

“How Kate Warne, America’s First Woman Detective, Foiled a Plot to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” by Kellie B. Gormly, Smithsonian Magazine

“The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” by Chris Enss

In Sunday’s New York Times, I report on Michael Hyatt, a two-time Olympian in table tennis who has conned dozens of women (and a few men) out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is currently believed to be on the run in Southeast Asia. 

This story had a personal element for me. I, too, have fallen for a top notch deception on a dating app back in 2021. While I didn’t lose financially, I learned months into the relationship that a guy I met on Bumble had an undisclosed wife and two children. I ended things immediately and felt deep shame and stupidity, some of which I still carry today. 

It served as a sobering reminder of something I’ve learned in nearly two decades of reporting on scams – even the best of us can fall for the worst of them. 

I saw myself and other survivors of cons in the stories of Kimberlie, Liz, Jodi, and others I interviewed for the story. It’s easy to look at wild tales of deception in the news, on podcasts or in documentaries – this one with an unusual Olympic flavor – and think, that could never happen to me. 

But in an age of more digital tools and connections, we also have to navigate a golden age of lying. 

I wrote the story not just to tell a tale of a con man, but to celebrate the resilience and savvy of the people who won’t settle for a world where misdeeds go uninterrogated. They pick up, they move forward with healing, and they fight back by living good lives. 

As I reported on the world of love, betrayal, and table tennis, I also became a licensed private investigator in California and a member of the California Association of Licensed Investigators. I’m only a couple of months in and already I am asking and receiving loads of questions about a fascinating, new world that, by definition, goes largely overlooked.  

So, I’m starting this Substack to offer glimpses into how investigation, be it as a private eye, filmmaker, or reporter, is the lens through which I see the world. That there are tricks and tools in this field that can benefit all of us. Exclusive insights! Behind-the-scenes details! Maybe even some dog content. 

Shortly after my own online dating debacle, I ended up finding real love. We read, we laugh, we edit each other’s writing, and he even offers to join me on stakeouts.

Welcome, subscribe, and keep looking over your shoulder.