I was put up to it, I swear.

Right before I moved to New York, my video producer friend Charlotte Buchen asked me to be the on-camera reporter for a Current TV piece on ‘eye gazing’ parties. Basically it’s like speed dating, except the flirting happens non-verbally. Rules are simple: Lock eyes with someone for three straight minutes, then move onto the next person. It’s pretty intense. I assure you, my flirting was purely part of the reporting process.

It’s just a self portrait of me in the bathroom of an Egyptian restaurant in upstate New York! I was on my way to a Muslim midday prayer service with a 22-year old convert and first wife in a polygamous religious marriage.

The Qur’an says a man may marry up to four wives, and some American converts are practicing the prophet’s lifestyle. So I decided to do a print and radio piece about how it’s done in the United States.

Reporting this story blew all my preconceived notions about Islam and the human heart out of the water. Many of the polygamous wives I interviewed either considered themselves feminists or said their love of God prevented them from feeling jealousy. They were some of the strongest and wisest women I’ve met.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece (and comments) here. Or, the slightly longer version on the News21 site.

Here’s a video I produced when I was at Journalism School. It’s a 2-minute feature I shot, reported and narrated as part of our newscast, which I also co-anchored. If you get bored of watching me and Larry Santana talk, you can scroll through to the middle of the newscast.

The piece is about Wendy-O-Matik, a writer and “radical love” activist in Berkeley. By profiling the polyamory workshops she gives in the San Francisco Bay area, it explores whether “being open” is a sexual orientation.

Before I embarked on months of Flash programming for my masters project on Colombian Landmine victims, I thought I would practice using the program with a topic a lighter topic. For a while, I was playing with the idea of doing my thesis on “polyamorous” people in the San Francisco Bay area, or people who take non-monagamy as a lifestyle and/or sexual orientation. For my research, I found profiled several different species, from the Dungfly to the Bonobo, about their non-monogamous tendencies. Apparently, being “sexually open” isn’t as unusual as you may think. Please, forgive the utter ridiculousness of this project. I promise, it was just for Flash practice.

One of the stories I worked on through my summer Knight-Carnegie News21 Fellowship aired October 13th.

The 8-minute Saturday Weekend Edition feature was called “American Muslim Family Chooses Polygamy,” a slightly shorter version of the piece I did this summer called “Matters of Love and Faith.”

I encourage folks to listen to the longer version - it gets more personal and has a lot more ambient sound.

There’s been some web discussion about the piece, which I’m happy about. But I didn’t always feel that way. Given the extreme sensitivity of the issue (Islam, polygamy and race, all in one!), I considered disabling online comments on the newsinitiative.org site to prevent a flame war. But so far it’s received positive feedback overall, especially from Muslims.

Special thanks to Sandy Tolan for editing, and for encouraging me to tell the story I felt most passionate about.