A Guardian piece on the small group of scientists who listen to fish and how they are now using AI to decode the mystery sounds of the ocean that an tell us everything from how healthy a reef is, to how fast climate change is destroying it. Read it here.
Radio and written features on how the rambunctious wild turkey came back from near extinction in the US, and colonised thousands of cities.
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 piece for From Our Own Correspondent here.
Read The Guardian feature on why wild turkeys are creating havoc in US cities here.
Feature in The Guardian on the myth of the ‘first Thanksgiving’ and the real Native American tribe, the Wampanoag, behind it. Read it here.
Photo: Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag, pictured in the 1970s in Plymouth, Massachusetts, during one of the first gatherings of The National Day of Mourning. Credit: The James family, with thanks.
Feature for The Guardian on the rise of ‘witch genealogy’ in America; the US citizens who trace their lineage back to 17th century victims executed for ‘witchcraft’. Read it here.
Photo: The memorial to Salem victim Susannah Martin, where US descendants leave flowers and letters. (Alice Hutton)
News feature on the historic race to elect Boston’s first non-white, female mayor. Read it here.
Photo: Campaigners for acting Boston mayor Kim Janey, the first black woman to hold the seat. Pictured by Lauren Miller.
Report for Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent from Lake Tahoe; where its famous ski resorts are split down the middle between California and Nevada. Two states with very different rules around the pandemic, and no border control. Listen to it here.
Photo: Alice Hutton
Piece in The Guardian on the world’s oldest, active drag queen, Darcelle XV, who staged onstage during Covid-19- despite being 90-years-old, and how other LGBT+ seniors are coping with the pandemic in the US. Read it here.
Photo: Darcelle XV in her younger years. Credit: Walter Cole.
News feature on the troubles facing CNN host Chris Cuomo, and the replacement of news on cable channels in the US with ‘infotainment.’ Read it here.
Photo credit: CNN.
A feature on the strange world of stigmatised property laws in the US in which some states force sellers to reveal a house’s ‘dark secrets’, including if it is haunted…Read it here.
A long read for The Independent on the stories of migrants during the pandemic and how they have started their lives again, from a woman escaping the threat of war in Lebanon to a British man moving to Spain because of Brexit. Read it here.
Feature in The Sunday Times’ travel section on the British family who swapped pandemic free Fiji for lockdown in the UK. Read more here (paywall).
Photo credit: Travelling Light Photography.
Feature in The Guardian on the Native American tribe in Maine who bought back an island stolen by white settlers 160-years-ago, as well as a wider look at ‘land back’ campaigns in the US. Read it here.
Photo: Donald Soctomah, The Passamaquoddy.
News feature in The Guardian on the rise in popularity of black horticulturalists, gardeners and botanists on social media in the US, reclaiming their connection to the land 150-years after racist, post Civil War laws separated their ancestors from it. Read it here.
Photo credit: Rachel Weaver Phenix.
Long read on what it has been like to move country during the pandemic featuring my own move to the US as well migrants in Turkey, Japan, UK, Germany, Australia and Spain. Read more here.
Feature for The Sunday Times Magazine on how it felt to throw a big, fat, mixed-race, British-Chinese, lesbian wedding. Read it here (pay wall).
Photos: Miss Gen. With thanks.
My report for Mail US on the release of the external review into sexual harassment allegations at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Ivy Leave college apologised to the alleged sexual assault victims of former professor and vice provost Jorge Dominguez after he reportedly sexually assaulted at least 18 women over 40-years. Read it here.
First person interview with US entrepreneur Brent Underwood who bought a 19th century ghost town in California for $1.4m- then got trapped in it by Covid19. Read more here.
Photo: Brent Underwood.
Feature on Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent on Allston Christmas; Boston’s annual moving day and America’s only trash-based holiday. Listen to it here.
Feature for The Independent on President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2020, as seen through the eyes of the far-right TV networks NewsMax and OAN, who offer a soothing ‘alternative reality’ for pro-Trump supporters. Read it here.
Exclusive on the Alpine village Hallstatt that has begged tourists to ‘stay away’ following a large fire after the UNESCO world-heritage site with just 780 residents accidentally went viral across east Asia as the ‘world’s most Instagrammable town’, falsely rumoured to be the basis for the Disney movie Frozen, leading to more than one million visitors a year. Read it here (pay wall).
Hallstatt photo one: Alice Hutton
Hallstatt photo two (fire): With permission from local resident.
Feature for The Independent on Yishan Wong, the ex Reddit CEO who left Silicon Valley nearly ten-years ago, only to resurface with a plan to save climate change by planting a trillion trees. Read it here.
Photo credit: Terraformation.
A feature for The Independent on how the right have weaponised the term ‘cancel culture’ as a tool of mass distraction. Read it here.
Exclusive in The Sunday Times on the launch of a new campaign demanding an end to the ‘gay tax’ on fertility treatment in the NHS that demands LGBT+ couples pay £10,000 to £30,000 to private clinics before they can have a baby. Read it here (pay wall).
Feature for The Atlantic on the rise of the far-right in Germany and the parallels with the political rhetoric of the 1930s that lead to the fall of ‘Babylon Berlin’- an extraordinary decade of LGBT freedom in the city. Click here to read more.
Feature on Radio 4’s From Our Home Correspondent programme on The Secret Post Office; a free postal service delivering letters internally at music festivals and learning about the lost art of letter-writing and ‘slow communication’. Listen here.
A comment piece for The i’s Brits Abroad series, ahead of the November 2020 election, on why not to underestimate the collective power of far-right voters. Read it here.
Feature for The Spaces architecture magazine on the unusual, rainbow coloured houses in Boston. Read it here.
Photos: Alice Hutton.
Piece on what it is like to live on a crumbling cliff edge in Britain- featuring the author Juliet Blaxland who immortalised her Georgian cottage in Easton Bavents, Suffolk, in her book The Easternmost House, now demolished (as of Jan 2020) after several metres of the soft cliff fell away overnight. Read more here (pay wall).
Photo: Permission Sunday Times.
Profile of The European Research Group (ERG) and arch-Brexiteers for Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin. Read more here.
(It’s in German but google translate will give you a roughly acceptable version).
Radio essay on BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent programme on the Berlin housing crisis- and how the government is reviving the once hated ex-Communist Plattenbau tower blocks. It can be listened to here.
BBC World piece on the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar facing a possible 40-years in jail for suggesting the judiciary is controlled by the government. Click here to watch him tell his story in a series of original drawings for the BBC.
Drawings by permission: Zunar
Piece on the rise of ‘the church of YouTube’- young people, particularly pagans, gathering large religious followings on social media that often eclipse traditional institutions like The Church of England.
Photo: Permission from Harmony Nice.
Exclusive on Remembrance Sunday- dedicated this year (2019) to the contribution of Commonwealth soldiers in the Second World War- on the Commonwealth soldiers - and their British descendents- being denied their place in history after the UK didn’t keep their military records. Read more here (pay wall).
Photo: With family permission.
Exclusive on the historic, family-run noodle shop Lo’s in London’s Chinatown- which has made 2.5miles a day for more than 40-years and supplies most of the local restaurants as well as Michelin-starred, celebrity hang-out Hakkasan, being closed by billionaire FTSE250 property developer Shaftesbury who wants to turn the building into an electrical substation. Read more here (pay wall).
A few weeks after The Sunday Times article Shaftesbury announced a stay of execution until June and a possible relocation for the substation.
Photo: Permission Sunday Times.
The Observer exclusive in November 2018 on the family of ex Liverpool footballer Frank Lockey being denied legal aid for his inquest after his death at a Norwich dementia care home. Read more here.
It follows on from a BBC Look East exclusive interview in 2017 with the family after his death at a care home in Norwich where they claim he was ‘neglected’. Read more here.
Photo credit: Lockey family.
Sunday Times piece on the high street law firm McMillan Williams being taken to an employment tribunal by ex partner Helen Clifford who claimed it was ‘morally bankrupt’. Read more here (pay wall).
Exclusive on the Conservative council leader in Warwickshire and the Extinction Rebellion activist who have teamed up to offer the UK’s first ever referendum on introducing a ‘climate change tax’. Read more here (pay wall).
Photo: Permission from Sunday Times.
Radio 4 PM package, digital video and online written pieces on the life of Professor Roger Lockyer, the historian who walked into the pages of history when he had one of the UK’s first civil partnerships. Watch the video and read the online piece here.
Photo credit: BBC/Against The Law.
Feature on Norfolk’s villages being ‘poisoned’ by the wealth of second-homers, including celebrities like the Duchess of Cambridge, pushing prices up, and locals out. Read it here (paywall).
Exclusive in The Sunday Times on the row over a blue plaque for Winston Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’ Polish countess Krystyna Skarbek, whose exploits during the Second World War became the model for the first Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. Read more here (pay wall).
UPDATE: The hotel owner agreed to the plaque following publication and it was successfully installed in September 2020.
A Radio 4 PM package, digital video and online written piece on the future of local newspapers following the announcement of a government review into the sustainability of the national and regional press. Watch the video and read the piece here.
Photo credit: Alice Hutton.
BBC Victoria Derbyshire Show, BBC Radio Cambridge and online written pieces/animation on the story of a gay, Syrian refugee starting his life again in Cambridge after fleeing his country as a teenager under death threats. Click here to watch the piece and read the online feature.
Animation graphics: Anglia Ruskin University animation department.
Photo credit: Alice Hutton
News feature for The Times on the disappearance of Sheffield Hallam independent MP Jared O’Mara. Read more here.
Photo composite: The Times and myself.
BBC Breakfast and online written pieces on the 10th anniversary of civil partnerships in the UK which granted LGBT couples civil rights similar to marriage for the first time. Featuring two couples whose lives were changed by the ceremony- an elderly pair who met in 1966 the homosexuality was still illegal, and transatlantic Youtubers in their 20s. Click here to watch and read both pieces.
Photo credit: Matthew James Arthur Payne.
Investigation for The Times on secretive private members club 5 Hertford Street being accused of paying its kitchen porters ‘poverty pay’. Read more here (paywall).
The update- the porters being offered a 35p per hour raise is here.
Photo: The Times.
Exclusive interview with the school in Leeds that ended up in the centre of a viral media storm across the world after deciding to buy two pigs to teach children about the food chain. Read it here.
Photo: The Times.
Obituary of the late writer and campaigner John Underwood who live-tweeted his own diagnosis and treatment of a rare, late-stage blood cancer. Read it here (pay wall).
Photo: The Times.
BBC digital video on what it is like to be a teen mum at university. After meeting Rashael five years ago when she picked up her A-level results in one hand and her 12-day old son Rasharn in the other I caught up with them five-years-later. Watch more here.
Photo credit: Alice Hutton.
Exclusive on the strange playground battle between the headteacher of the top Catholic girls school St Catherine’s in Bexley, London, and the teachers who accused hr of ‘bullying’, leading to weeks of strikes and cancelled lessons.
Photo: With permission Sunday Times.
Feature for The Times on a 96-year-old US D-Day paratrooper’s lost love. Read it here.
Photo: The Times.
BBC Breakfast piece on The Good Immigrant- a book of essays by mostly British, BAME artists, writers, poets and actors about their experiences of race, immigration and identity in 21st century Britain. It also featured a sofa interview afterwards with the book’s editor Nikesh Shukla and BBC Breakfast presenters. Click here to watch more.
Feature for The Times as part of its D-Day coverage on the English Heritage blue plaque being given to a house in suburban Hendon used as a mission control for infamous double-agent Juan Pujol García; a Spanish chicken farmer turned MI5 double agent whose extraordinary ruses saved countless lives during the Second World War. Read it here.
Times series of pieces over several years on the death of young mother Desreen Brooks in a fatal car crash and subsequent trial of the pensioner accused of killing her. Read my last piece here.
Photo credit: Brooks-Dutton family.
Exclusive for The Times on the poll blunder in a tiny town in Cumbria in the May 2019 local election which accidentally elected the wrong person- giving one man his wife’s seat. Read more here.
Photo: Peter and Karen Groucott.
Exclusive Guardian piece on the inquests of four children who died at Great Ormond Street Hospital following a series of alleged failures in how stem cells were frozen at the national children’s hospital. Click here to read more.
BBC News at Six TV and online written pieces on Clare Hollingworth, the British war correspondent who broke the news of the Second World War, turns 105 in Hong Kong and hears a special birthday message from the refugee child she saved in Poland 70-years-ago. Click here to watch the digital cut-down video, the birthday message by Margo Stanyer and read the online piece.
Photo credit: Hollingworth family.
BBC Victoria Derbyshire Show, BBC London News at Six, BBC News Channel and Online piece on Pad Man, the world’s first feature film about sanitary pads, about the real-life story of a poor factory worker who started a revolution in women’s health care and featuring Bollywood star Akshay Kumar. Watch the digital video cut down here and read the online piece here.
Photo credit: Sony Pictures.
A Times feature/obit on Percy Steven, the South African director and drama lecturer who taught Gary Oldman who found fame late in life as a gay activist after having one of the first civil partnerships. Read more here (pay wall).
Photo credit: Alice Hutton.
Live reports into the BBC News Channel, BBC World, BBC 5Live and packaging for BBC News at Five of the protest, about the detention in Iran of British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, led by actress Emma Thompson. See more here.
Photo credit: Alice Hutton.
BBC World TV, digital video and 5Live pieces featuring a British couple who were stranded in Sint Maarten by Hurricane Irma. Watch the video/listen to the 5Live interview here.
The Times feature/obit on the war-time wren Hilary Bedford who worked for Alan Turing at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Click here to read more (pay wall).
Photo credit: Bedford family.
Feature on the Wigan to Pyongyang Express- the world’s first Communist-themed 9,000-mile train ride touring the world’s embalmed dictators from Lenin and Stalin to Chairman Mao to Kim Jong-il. Read it here (pay wall).
Exclusive on the Home Office raiding a ‘sham wedding’ that turned out to be real, as part of their ‘hostile environment’ towards immigrants and foreign nationals marrying in the UK. Read it here.
