Big news! I’m writing a book about the trailblazing fashion designer Claire McCardell, whose visionary designs helped women live independent lives.

“Neil breaks life down to the fundamentals of what it is that makes us human,” the actor Jon Hamm tells me.

For this cover story in The Washington Post Magazine, I go inside the harrowing true crime story of American pothunters.

In 1927, a Baltimore inventor built a rocket to get to the planet Venus. Nearly a century later, a documentary crew is on a mission to find it.

My mother’s childhood bout with polio paralyzed more than her body. I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand that paralysis.

In this cover story for The Washington Post Magazine, I hunt down one of the most infamous crimes in Hollywood history.

“Men are free from the clothes problem—why should I not follow their example?” A profile of Claire McCardell who took on the fashion industry and revolutionized what women wear.

I talk literary ghosts and haunted houses and creepy dollhouse murder scenes with the literary mavens of The Inner Loop. I also read from my memoir-in-progress.

In this cover story for the Johns Hopkins Health Review, I go inside the labs of scientists endeavoring to map the genome of one of the oldest living organisms on earth.

How Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress and a grandmother, pioneered crime scene investigation with doll houses.

A Podcast interview about my research into the life of Frances Glessner Lee and her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death for The New Yorker.

In 2017 the Mall of America announced a writer-in-residence program and the idea of living and writing inside a mall inspired this piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies

An aging astronaut struggles with soaring expectations and an unexpected phobia in this story published in The Southern Review.

There’s a global epidemic of overscheduling and it’s ruining our health. Here’s how to recalibrate your relationship with time.

Winner of the 2015 Hrushka Nonfiction Prize and published in Passages North.

A Pushcart Prize-nominated essay about suicide and the legacy of family secrets. Recognized in Best American Essays 2016.

This essay explores the concept of “desire lines” and considers how we build cities with empathy.

Why the oldest winemaking technique in the world is making a comeback.

Two rival cultural organizations hear a rumor that one of the wealthiest women in town is on her deathbed. The hunt for her inheritance begins.

Architecture is more than merely aesthetics. Listen to my on-air essay for public radio about architecture and design.