1. "The Idealist," Slate, February 7, 2013. A long biographical profile of the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, written and reported in the weeks after his suicide. This article was the genesis of the book The Idealist.

2. "I Wanted to Be a Millionaire," Slate, February 4, 2015. A first-person essay about how it felt to lose $225,000 on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Spoiler alert: It felt bad.

3. "Man About Town," Columbia Journalism Review, October 27, 2009. A brief profile of the journalist Kery Murakami, reluctant proprietor of a now-defunct news site called the Seattle PostGlobe.

4. "What About Modesto?," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011. I conceived and edited this package of stories about how the digital news revolution was bypassing small cities like Modesto, Calif., and why that was a problem. This package, which ran in the magazine's fiftieth anniversary issue, was probably the best thing I did during my five years as an editor at CJR.

5. "The Trendiest Guy in New York City," Slate, November 14, 2012. I attempt to live out some of the trends touted by the "Style" section of The New York Times.

6. "Rocky Mountain Fever," Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2012. A reconsideration of Timber Line, Gene Fowler's outlandish 1933 book about the turn-of-the-century Denver Post, which might have been the worst newspaper in history.

7. "A Hall of Fame for Great Stories," The New York Times, March 1, 2007. A profile of the Baseball Reliquary, an offbeat museum of baseball history, and its puckish founder, Terry Cannon.

8. "Boarish Behavior," Washington Monthly, January/February 2012. A review of Year of the Pig, Mark Hainds' account of the year he spent hunting feral pigs in eleven different states. The lede for this review -- "There comes a point in every man's life when he realizes he hasn't spent enough time killing feral pigs" -- might be my favorite lede I've ever written.

9. "On Facebook and Freedom," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011. An essay about the future of news in the Facebook era, written for CJR's fiftieth anniversary issue. I think this piece is as relevant today as it was in 2011.

10. "How the Soloflex Changed America," Slate, January 20. 2011. An article recounting the surprisingly interesting history of the Soloflex, the first all-in-one home fitness device, and its larger-than-life inventor, Jerry Lee Wilson. Soloflex is America, basically.