After DUI, she quit drinking and opened a bar || It started with a Jack and Coke at a pub in Silver Spring, Md., and ended with a police officer pulling over Vergie “Gigi” Arandid minutes from her home. She blew a 00.21 percent on the breathalyzer – more than two times the legal limit. She totaled the car she was driving but didn’t remember how it happened.

Years later, Arandid founded and opened Binge Bar, Washington, D.C.’s first nonalcoholic bar. It’s part of the nationwide growth of no-alcohol establishments fueled by the changing drinking habits of Gen Z and millennials. I pitched, reported, wrote and completed all of the photography and videography for this story that was published in The Washington Post online and on the front page of its Metro section during Dry January in 2024. To read more about how Arandid overcame binge drinking to become the owner of the first sober bar in the nation’s capital and how she’s making it a sustainable business, click here.

Flashes, shimmers and blind spots: Here’s what migraine aura looks like || Migraine is a neurological disorder characterized by severe, even debilitating, pain on one side of the head, and can be accompanied by other symptoms such as aura, a sensory disturbance that can cause temporary visual impairment.

I spoke to four chronic migraine sufferers about living with migraine with aura for The Washington Post. Based on their vivid descriptions, my colleague Brian Monroe created animations to show what migraine auras look like through the eyes of people who suffer from them.

Along with pitching, reporting and writing this story, I traveled to Massachusetts to interview, photograph and film Bethany Noël, who documents her migraine auras in her work as a professional artist. She is one of the more than 1 billion people worldwide who suffer from migraine, and among the estimated 25 percent of migraine sufferers who experience aura. Migraine is the second leading cause of disability in the world, and the first among young women. Attacks can last for hours or days. To learn more about migraine aura and how four chronic migraine sufferers cope, click here.

The speedy scientific workout you can do almost anywhere || Stuck for time or space to exercise? This study may have the workout for you. A comparison of different types of short, intense workouts found that a five-exercise bodyweight routine is as good as treadmill intervals.

I was responsible for bringing a workout story to life visually for reporting by Washington Post columnist Gretchen Reynolds. I executed this by working with the researcher of the workout study, Gabriella Bellissimo, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Because the story focused on five different exercises, I wanted each one to be filmed in a different location.

After its online publication, my video work was made into illustrations by Elizabeth von Oehsen to appear on the front page of Health & Science in the newspaper. I also edited the footage into a 40-second video explainer for TikTok.