February 2011—After flying south over miles of gorgeous turquoise ocean, punctuated by small fishing vessels glinting in the bright sun, we banked left…

December 2021

September 2011—I wanted to get inside a prison to see what it was really like. “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its…

November 2021

In May 2016, the numbers on my Venezuela Econ website showed the currency now weakened past 1,100 per dollar on the black market—and the streets were…
Just before midnight on September 28, 2011, I and the other journalists covering Venezuela saw that El Nuevo Herald, a fiery Spanish-language sister to…
Alex Saab will today plead not guilty to money laundering charges in a Florida court. This excerpt offers the story behind our investigation into his…

September 2021

We sat on a small metal boat and glided downriver, meandering through foliage and tiny mines. Armed with weighing scales, magnifying glasses and…

August 2021

On the Venezuela/Colombia border
It was March 5, 2013. I’d woken up early that morning and visited a small chapel outside the military hospital where Hugo Chávez was being treated…
Covering Hugo Chávez's cancer announcement for New York Times and Reuters

July 2021

Most news outlets pay per word published, a concept I’ve always thought absurd, as of course some words cost more to produce than others. Consider, for…
Around the age of eleven, in the late 1990s, I had taught myself to code. I had no benchmark, curriculum, or people around me doing it, so I just kept…
A couple of weeks into my time in Mexico, I read in a local newspaper about Ponchis, a teenage assassin who had become the face of the country’s drug…