I’m a professional writer. I’ve made peace with the editorial process. Editors change your text and if you don’t agree with it, you move on and write another day.

That said: With this story, I want to applaud my editors for not changing some stuff. The assignment was to write about wedding loans. All of my research made them seem like bad ideas. My draft included a long and early warning against using them before providing information about them. I’m very happy that The Plunge ran the section excerpted below verbatim not because it’s scintillating, untouchable prose but because it’s what the people considering wedding loans really need to hear.

Real Talk

Let’s get this out of the way early: you should view wedding loans as a weapon of last resort. Personal finance experts strongly caution against wedding loans. In fact, two financial planners contacted for this story flatly refused to comment based on the premise.

Good on The Plunge for keeping that in. As always, click on the picture to read the full story.

I’m proud of this story overall and Eli Finkel provides a lot of invaluable insight. But while it’s a well-constructed, well-reported article with helpful insights for couples, I’m particularly fond of the riffs and wordplay in the first two paragraphs. I’m a jokester at heart, I guess.

Everybody involved with these movies has been too rich to notice that rich people are the logical bad guys of the films.

With Americans growing increasingly interested in consensual non-monogamy, I talked to researchers and therapists about how their professions are accommodating that interest for a feature story.

You’d think that after your company was proven to be a massive fraud, you’d take down the social media account you used to trumpet your phony success. Well, not if you’re Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Click the pic for my story on her surprisingly still-available Twitter account.

I took advantage of a politically-charged fight between Social Distortion singer Mike Ness and a fan to write out every thought I’ve ever had about one of my favorite punk bands.

For this Fatherly feature, I reached out to dads suffering from depression and children of dads who suffer from depression to see how stubbornness factors into their lives. I’m grateful for getting the chance to hear their stories and hope I related them truthfully. As always, click the picture for the story.