My story for Washingtonian on the time D.C.'s Catholic University went single-sex in its dorms -- and students learned to sneak through windows and up gutterpipes to circumvent the new rules. Illustration for Washingtonian by Tomi Um.
Travel story for the Washington Post, in which I chase the Moomins through Finland:
Read MoreIt’s raining gently, and I’m standing in an outdoor theater, in the middle of a crowd of children and parents. Onstage, an actor in a giant, square-shaped fur suit with a red triangle nose lumbers from foot to foot and shakes his head, waggling the pink tentacles atop it. Another man, in a police officer’s uniform, is making officious gestures, while a woman with long red hair, wearing a peaked red cap and red robes and with whiskers painted on her face, speaks squeakily into a microphone in Finnish, a language I do not remotely understand.
This is not some sauna-induced nightmare: It’s the afternoon’s theatrical offering at Moominworld, an amusement park in the coastal Finnish town of Naantali. The actors are playing minor characters in the Moomin stories, a series of children’s books by Tove Jansson, a Swedish-Finnish author and artist who would have turned 100 this month. (She died in 2001.) The Moomins themselves — a family of three: Moomintroll, Moominpappa and Moominmamma — are hippolike creatures with ballooning snouts and tubby bellies, always setting off on bold quests or making discoveries.
In June, I set off on a quest of my own, traveling through Finland in search of the Moomin-land I’ve loved since I read the books in English translation as a child.
Washingtonian: Private Social Clubs are Doomed
Checking up on the fortunes of D.C.'s most exclusive private clubs:
Washington’s social clubs have survived periods of crisis before, namely the 1960s, when they struggled over whether to admit African-Americans—attorney general Robert F. Kennedy once boycotted the then whites-only Metropolitan Club—and the ’80s, when male bastions like the Cosmos and the Metropolitan faced the apparently more staggering question of whether to admit women. It may be too early, in other words, to say the game is up for Washington’s private clubs. Facing today’s existential challenges, they’re evolving in ways that would have been unimaginable to their founders.