I’m a 36-year-old writer and editor living in Nashville, Tennesee.

I’m currently a senior writer for Huffington Post, where I do investigative reporting on civil liberties and the criminal justice system, and write about music and culture in Nashville.

Before that, I was senior editor for Reason magazine, where I wrote award-winning investigative journalism features and weekly columns on civil liberties. Prior to that, I was a policy analyst for the Cato Institute, where I covered civil liberties and the drug war. From 2002 until 2009, I was also a biweekly columnist with FoxNews.com.

I’ve been published in a variety of places, from Playboy to the Wall Street Journal, have done lots of TV and radio interviews (see resume or published writing), and twice testified before Congress. My work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, and cited and excerpted by the Mississippi State Supreme Court. My reporting helped get a guy off death row and eventually freed, helped win a new trial and acquittal for a 13-year-old murder suspect, and led to the firing of a corrupt medical examiner in Mississippi. My reporting on the overuse of SWAT teams and police militarization has been profiled by the New York Times, National Journal, National Public Radio, and the Economist.

My 2009 feature on forensics fraud in a Louisiana murder case won the Western Publication Association’s “Maggie Award” for reporting. In 2011 I was a finalist for The Week’s “Opinion Columnist of the Year” award, and was named the L.A. Press Club’s Journalist of the Year.

I’m originally from Greenfield, Indiana. I graduated from Indiana University in 1997 with a BA in journalism and political science.

I’m a music buff, an amateur photographer, and an admitted “dog person.” One day, I’ll teach one of my dogs to retrieve a beer from the refrigerator on command.