I'm an experienced journalist/corporate writer. While I love to write about science and medicine, I also enjoy penning lifestyle pieces, dog-themed articles and writing about people who do cool stuff.
This simple machine turns glass bottles into sand
Katie Aldworth grabs an empty wine bottle, puts it into a glass crusher, and then walks through her Maryland pottery studio with the end product: glass sand. After measuring out 275 grams, she pours the pulverized glass into a mold and bakes it in her kiln.
It sounds simple, but it’s taken her nearly three months to figure out how to turn used wine bottles into glass plates. When Aldworth pulls one from the kiln, a little light pops through. The color, she says, is “seaweed. It couldn’t be mo...
How to Take Advantage of the U.S. Huts System
With skins on her Alpine Touring (AT) skis and about 35 pounds on her back, Ann Kampf of Silverthorne, Colorado, trekked away from the resorts in Summit County, Colorado. She was wearing a bespeckled tutu around her waist because, “why not! It’s fun and festive!” says Kampf.
The 73-year old was headed into the White River National Forest for a few nights in a hut with 16 others ranging in age from 55 to 78. The removable skins on her skis gripped the snow as she climbed up Bald Mountain on ma...
Chef Mawa McQueen spent her life in survival mode. Now it’s paying off.
How a James Beard nomination changed everything
When Mawa McQueen found out in 2022 that she’d received a James Beard nomination for best chef, she thought the foundation had made a mistake. A culinary award had never entered her consciousness. Her entire life — from her childhood in Ivory Coast to her upbringing in a poor Parisian neighborhood to years waiting tables in ski resort towns such as Valloire in the Alps and Aspen, Colorado, where she now presides over her award-winning resta...
3 ways preventative hearing care can improve your health: A new study suggests hearing aids can reduce cognitive decline by 50 percent.
Cathy B.* doesn’t remember a time when she could hear well. The 58-year-old says by the time she was in her late forties, her hearing had become a big issue — at home, at work and, even with her friends. “My doctor didn’t recommend a test. But, everyone around me was pushing me to get my hearing tested because [it] was really turning into a problem, socially. Then, a friend died after a horrible battle with cancer a...
Washingtonian | February 2024
Young stroke is on the rise in Washington, DC, the nation and the world; but, young people are less likely to recognize the signs. Here's what to know.
Taster’s choice: Our 2023 cookbook recommendations for food lovers
Food
We asked bookstore owners for their best new finds and familiar favorites
As you press forward with your holiday shopping for the foodies in your life, shoot some cookbooks to the top of your gift-buying list. We’ve asked a few of our favorite booksellers — both online and brick-and-mortar stores — to help us sift through this year’s new cookbooks penned and published by Black authors, and they came back with some new recommendations but told us not to forget some old gems. A gift to tas...
The Unsung Hero Who Saved Thousands of Children During the Holocaust
In 1997, musician Miriam Keesing came across photos of a boy she didn’t recognize while sorting through the attic of her late father’s home in Castricum, a seaside village just outside of Amsterdam.
When Keesing asked her aunt who the boy was, she replied, “Oh, that’s Uli. He was a refugee child. He lived with us for a while.” Intrigued, Keesing started looking into the child’s story, identifying him as Gerhard Ulrich Herzberg, a German Jew who escaped from the Nazis and arrived unaccompanied...
How D.C.’s version of the High Line aims to avoid New York’s mistakes
The 11th Street Bridge Park engaged community members from the outset, working to understand what residents needed and find ways to limit displacement.
Outside the Box
Sometimes, working with a dream team means that what architect Gregory Ehrman calls the “daydream phase” of a project actually comes true. That’s what happened on a piece of land overlooking the Magothy River near its confluence with the Chesapeake Bay; even before his clients drew up a wish list for their Gibson Island, Maryland, retreat, Ehrman says there was a fantastic team in place.
“We were all in lockstep from the beginning,” agrees landscape architect Bob Hruby.
“A dream team is what ...
Citizen-Scientist Coalition Works to Protect Native Mussels on the St. Croix River
With its visible byssal threads—the strong fibers that bivalves like mussels and oysters use to attach to objects—Karns’s zebra mussel tattoo looks like it’s affixed itself to his right calf, a symbol of the invasive species’ relentless hold on the river as much as Karns’s own resolve to preserve its native mussel population.
For Karns, the tattoos represent the three decades he worked for the National Park Service (NPS), including 15 years as an aquatic biologist working to conserve the St. ...
Forgotten Thanksgiving foods that once had a presence at the table
Food
We asked foodies and food historians what menu items have gone missing – and may be coming back
Zelda Owens’ Thanksgiving menu looks much like the ones she remembers growing up in Harlem. For an entire generation – possibly two – the collards in her family’s traditional collard green dish came from a grocery store. But now, “Harvesting from the backyard is the tradition I brought back,” said Owens.
She was one of a number of foodies and food historians we reached out to find out what Tha...
Chef Nina Compton of New Orleans tells a story with her dishes
Award-winning chef combines her Caribbean past, and years of being tutored by French and Italian chefs in her dishes
A leader in the culinary world, chef Nina Compton is intentionally carving a path for more women in the restaurant industry. The first Black woman to win the James Beard Award for best chef (in 2018), during her years of training, Compton, 41, was intensely aware of the small number of women, especially people of color, in high-end kitchens. While balancing the demands of ...
As Goodies as it gets
Food
Time is frozen at the old icehouse in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia
Some might call Brandon Byrd, the founder and owner of Goodies Frozen Custard & Treats outside of Washington, old school. One look at the corner lot in Alexandria, Virginia, where Goodies dishes out Wisconsin-style vanilla-bean frozen custard from an old icehouse, and you’re thrown back to a different era:
First, there’s Byrd, wearing a bow tie, newsboy cap and suspenders, greeting customers. Then, the vintage license ...
The Untapped Potential of America’s Largest Edible Native Fruit
Whenever Devon Mihesuah visited her grandparents’ house in Muskogee, Oklahoma in early autumn as a child, she would accompany her grandmother on foraging hunts. The treasures they were looking for? Pawpaw, the largest edible fruit native to North America.
Though decades have passed since those pawpaw-hunting adventures, Mihesuah, an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, decided five years ago to plant a grove of the fruit trees in her family garden in Baldwin City, Kansas. After...
Glendon Hartley is ‘nerding out’ about cocktails
Food
How the co-owner of James Beard Award-nominated Causa/Amazonia found his purpose
Glendon Hartley became an entrepreneur in middle school. He admits that back then, his business operated on the wrong side of the law: he stole candy, cigars, cigarettes and the like and sold them to students at his suburban Washington school. “I had people working for me,” said Hartley, who now has 70 employees as co-owner of Causa | Amazonia, nominated this year for a James Beard Award for Best New Restaur...