About 15 years ago, just before I became a dad, I bought my first guitar. It was a Fender acoustic, candy-apple red. I couldn’t play guitar. Wasn’t much of a singer, either. And even though I’d been a professional writer for most of my adult life, I didn’t know how to write a song. But I looked up to Michael Brick. Michael was a tall guy from Texas who wore cowboy boots. He wrote for The New York Times. When I hosted a gathering of writers in the woods of South Georgia, Michael strolled in and pretty much set the room on fire. He picked up the guitar and started playing a song he wrote. We didn’t know this guy and we’d never heard the song before. But before it was over, MOST OF US WERE SINGING ALONG TO THE CHORUS. That’s how good it was. How good he was. If you were there, you know. It was a few months later when I bought that red guitar. I was 29. Too old to be starting, perhaps. But I took a few lessons, learned a few chords. My daughter was born. I sat in the hallway of our building, going from B-minor to G, while she crawled around on the carpet. I kept practicing until I figured out “The Beaches of Cheyenne," by Garth Brooks. At the next writers’ conference, people listened politely. I saw Michael about once a year. Bought some cowboy boots because he made them look so good. Spent most of the year looking forward to the next time I could hear him sing. In 2014, there was one song I was hoping he’d play. But Michael was not a jukebox. He did things on his own schedule. He didn’t play the song on Thursday night. He didn’t play it on Friday night. Finally, he played it on Saturday night. It was even better than I’d remembered. A few months later, we found out that Michael had cancer. Some of us flew to Texas to see him. We went back in early 2016, for his funeral. Michael Brick was 41. He was survived by his wife and children. Later that year, The Lake Family Band played a show in our front yard for a local festival called Porchfest. The band included some of my friends and relatives, including my dad, a great lead guitarist. We played cover songs. I played rhythm and sang a few songs like the amateur I was. By then my wife and I had three children, and our fourth was born the next year. I kept playing guitar, kept singing. It got a little easier. During the pandemic, my two oldest started taking Zoom lessons on piano. And I sang “Daddy Songs” at bedtime. One night in 2022, I was singing some lullaby or another when these new words started coming to me. A song of my own. I ran to find a pen so I could write it down. Then I wrote another song, and another. When I played some of these songs at Porchfest ‘23, they were just okay. I listened to the recording and realized I needed to get much better at singing my own songs. So I signed up for voice lessons and did guided vocal workouts several times a week. There’s one part on the workout where the teacher says to “keep it bright and bratty.” My 11-year-old son heard this part, unfortunately. Then he kept telling me to keep it bright and bratty. I did. Last year we played a few times at the Songwriters’ Open Mic Night at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Georgia. It was me and my wife, Sara, with our older daughter on piano. We made the finals one evening, but didn’t win. My singing still needed to improve. Last summer I did something very hard: I gave up coffee. It made a difference. A few months ago, there were layoffs at my company. Losing my job wasn’t great, but it did give me more time to work on music. I found a producer in a local musicians’ Facebook group who had his own studio. We booked a date. On a Saturday morning in April, I put on my cowboy boots and packed up the old red Fender I’d purchased after hearing Michael Brick sing. Then the Lake Family Band went into the studio and recorded our first song. A song I wrote. It’s about fatherhood and unconditional love. I would like you to hear it. I’ll never be like Michael Brick. But I’ll never forget him, either. Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

If you are a sports editor anywhere around the world and need a correspondent in the metro Atlanta area, hit me up. I can cover anything about any sport. I can write any type of story. Feel free to DM me.

In Georgia, “Peches” is (and are) always in season: ajc.com/news/2026/03/roadwor…

If you missed this story when it came out: This piece is easily on the short list for the best feature of 2025. What a talent this writer is.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published its last newspaper yesterday. I wrote a story about endings, beginnings, and little whirlwinds. You can keep reading us in ‘26 on AJC.com.

A gripping new feature story from @ThompsonJamieL at @TheAtlantic. Read to the very end. theatlantic.com/magazine/202…

So kind of you, Davy! Thanks for listening.

Almost 17 years after leaving newspapers, I’ve come back. Last week I started a new job with my hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. What kinds of stories will I do? More like this one, I hope. On Friday night I watched the sunset on Stone Mountain and had the privilege of writing about it. It reminded me of how much I love this work. What else should I write about? I’d love to hear your ideas. You can share them here, or email thomas.lake@ajc.com. Many thanks to @morsea and @AJCLeroyChapman for giving me a chance at the @ajc, and to @mikeesterl for guiding me through my first week and making this story better. Onward!

The upstate New York town of Herkimer and its famous native, The Human Calculator, have something to say about basketball. Namely, that the game was invented there. Read my story and discuss: nytimes.com/2025/06/17/nyreg… via @NYTimes

About 15 years ago, just before I became a dad, I bought my first guitar. It was a Fender acoustic, candy-apple red. I couldn’t play guitar. Wasn’t much of a singer, either. And even though I’d been a professional writer for most of my adult life, I didn’t know how to write a song. But I looked up to Michael Brick. Michael was a tall guy from Texas who wore cowboy boots. He wrote for The New York Times. When I hosted a gathering of writers in the woods of South Georgia, Michael strolled in and pretty much set the room on fire. He picked up the guitar and started playing a song he wrote. We didn’t know this guy and we’d never heard the song before. But before it was over, MOST OF US WERE SINGING ALONG TO THE CHORUS. That’s how good it was. How good he was. If you were there, you know. It was a few months later when I bought that red guitar. I was 29. Too old to be starting, perhaps. But I took a few lessons, learned a few chords. My daughter was born. I sat in the hallway of our building, going from B-minor to G, while she crawled around on the carpet. I kept practicing until I figured out “The Beaches of Cheyenne," by Garth Brooks. At the next writers’ conference, people listened politely. I saw Michael about once a year. Bought some cowboy boots because he made them look so good. Spent most of the year looking forward to the next time I could hear him sing. In 2014, there was one song I was hoping he’d play. But Michael was not a jukebox. He did things on his own schedule. He didn’t play the song on Thursday night. He didn’t play it on Friday night. Finally, he played it on Saturday night. It was even better than I’d remembered. A few months later, we found out that Michael had cancer. Some of us flew to Texas to see him. We went back in early 2016, for his funeral. Michael Brick was 41. He was survived by his wife and children. Later that year, The Lake Family Band played a show in our front yard for a local festival called Porchfest. The band included some of my friends and relatives, including my dad, a great lead guitarist. We played cover songs. I played rhythm and sang a few songs like the amateur I was. By then my wife and I had three children, and our fourth was born the next year. I kept playing guitar, kept singing. It got a little easier. During the pandemic, my two oldest started taking Zoom lessons on piano. And I sang “Daddy Songs” at bedtime. One night in 2022, I was singing some lullaby or another when these new words started coming to me. A song of my own. I ran to find a pen so I could write it down. Then I wrote another song, and another. When I played some of these songs at Porchfest ‘23, they were just okay. I listened to the recording and realized I needed to get much better at singing my own songs. So I signed up for voice lessons and did guided vocal workouts several times a week. There’s one part on the workout where the teacher says to “keep it bright and bratty.” My 11-year-old son heard this part, unfortunately. Then he kept telling me to keep it bright and bratty. I did. Last year we played a few times at the Songwriters’ Open Mic Night at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Georgia. It was me and my wife, Sara, with our older daughter on piano. We made the finals one evening, but didn’t win. My singing still needed to improve. Last summer I did something very hard: I gave up coffee. It made a difference. A few months ago, there were layoffs at my company. Losing my job wasn’t great, but it did give me more time to work on music. I found a producer in a local musicians’ Facebook group who had his own studio. We booked a date. On a Saturday morning in April, I put on my cowboy boots and packed up the old red Fender I’d purchased after hearing Michael Brick sing. Then the Lake Family Band went into the studio and recorded our first song. A song I wrote. It’s about fatherhood and unconditional love. I would like you to hear it. I’ll never be like Michael Brick. But I’ll never forget him, either. Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

Today is my last day with CNN, and I've got one more story to share with you. It's about a woman whose son was murdered. She wanted to kill the perpetrators. And she couldn't have guessed what would happen next. cnn.com/interactive/2025/02/…

Despite 20 knife wounds and at least 11 bruises, authorities said her death was a suicide. Now a pathologist has made a stunning reversal: cnn.com/2025/02/03/us/ellen-…

Well, it was my turn, I guess. My position was eliminated in today’s budget cuts. I’d like to thank CNN for almost 10 great years and some memorable adventures. I wrote the first book about the 2016 presidential campaign. UNPRECEDENTED was finished within days of the election and delivered in hardcover before Christmas. My investigative series on the death of James Brown began with a strange phone call from a circus singer. As the story says, “I traveled through nine states, read tens of thousands of pages of police and court records, interviewed nearly 140 people, questioned Jacque for hundreds of hours, mined the depths of her three storage units for records stretching back more than 30 years, analyzed more than 1,300 pages of text messages from her iPhone, and sent an item from her green plastic bin for testing at a forensic laboratory.” After that I found an innocent man who spent 46 years in prison. Richard Phillips kept his sanity by learning to paint watercolor paintings. He also made a plan to kill the man who framed him. Read the story to learn more. As the pandemic set in, I began an essay series, The Distance, about ordinary people living and dying in this strange new world. I started by writing about my family’s walk to Dairy Queen: “My wife and kids stayed outside. I went in alone. It was nearly deserted. Elsewhere in America, restaurants were closing: some just for now, and some forever. Good people had lost their jobs, and many more would lose them soon. Some of us would go hungry. Some would fight for one more breath. A tremor seemed to pass beneath my feet, rippling from ocean to ocean.” I hosted a podcast series called The James Brown Mystery. I examined a heroic police officer’s death outside Oklahoma City, and the disappearances of two men Florida after an encounter with a deputy sheriff, and a mother’s four-decade quest to find her son, a paperboy named Johnny Gosch, who vanished while doing his route one morning in 1982. I wrote about parents who did not believe their daughter had killed herself, given that she was found with 20 knife wounds and at least 11 bruises. It has been a privilege to do this work. Journalism does matter, and it does make a difference. When it’s done well, it helps us see each other more clearly. We can’t give up. I’m still here, and already excited about my next adventure. Send me an email or a DM if you want to chat. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

New this morning for @POLITICO and @POLITICOMag. tinyurl.com/54r5xu6k

Ellen Greenberg, a beloved schoolteacher in Philadelphia, was found with 20 knife wounds and at least 11 bruises. Authorities said she killed herself. Here’s my new story: cnn.com/interactive/2024/12/…

What it’s like here. gardenandgun.com/articles/di…

In the US today, more and more people with full-time jobs are being pushed into homelessness. Low-wage workers can't afford rent. My book explores the staggering rise of America's working homeless, told through the lives of five families in Atlanta. 1/ penguinrandomhouse.com/books…