From Central America he has written for the New York Times, the Wilson Center, the Los Angeles Times, InSight Crime, Foreign Policy, VICE News, GlobalPost, the Christian Science Monitor and Southern Pulse. In his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, he has served as editor-in-chief for the inaugural issue of Out in STL, a quarterly magazine for the city's LGBTQ community. He has also served as deputy news editor, staff writer and news blogger at the Riverfront Times, an alt-weekly. Before all of this, he was part of an investigative team at The New York Times that exposed disability fraud in the Long Island Rail Road. He received his M.S. from the Journalism School at Columbia University in 2008. He speaks French and Spanish, and can ride a motorcycle (poorly).