Jesse Hicks

One example of the many "transformation" profiles I've done for Men's Health, focusing on fitness and weight loss.

More are available here: https://www.menshealth.com/author/212830/jesse-hicks/

For American History magazine, I wrote a cover story about the rise and fall of absinthe in the United States.

When Joybubbles died in 2007, his New York Times obituary called him the “Peter Pan of phonehackers.” And that phrase neatly summed up his life: Born Joe Engressia Jr., through his restless and relentless exploration he’d become a seminal figure in the early culture of what came to be known as “phone phreaking.” Blind from birth, at an early age he’d learned that just by whistling he could make ordinary telephones obey him. That was in the 1950s; he may have been the first person to whistle h...

One of the country’s most audacious forgeries sold at auction Wednesday, more than three decades after it was revealed as a fraud.

When Dr. Carrie Madej took the stage at the MAGA Freedom Rally D.C. on Wednesday, police sirens wailed as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. The president’s guest speaker told the crowd, a mix of QAnon supporters and far-right MAGA fans, her thoughts on the COVID vaccine: that it contains bio-sensing nanomachines designed to alter human DNA and control people’s minds.

As far as spy names go, “James Fortune” sounds like a bargain-bin Bond, something out of a lazily-written pulp novel. So of course when Project Veritas tried to infiltrate several progressive groups in North Carolina, the right-wing pseudo-journalism outfit sent in a guy with the fakest possible nom de guerre, only to see Fortune undone by his own hubris—and a killer bout of seasickness.
Far from being a suave super-spy, Fortune was really just a mindfulness-loving Crossfit bro from NYC, a lon...

For Project Veritas, the 2020 Democratic primaries offered an embarrassment of riches. A historically large field meant plenty of targets against which James O’Keefe’s journalism-cosplay organization could deploy its signature tactic of getting low-level political operatives to say something embarrassing into a hidden camera, then hype a selectively edited video for maximum echo-chamber outrage. As we’ve already reported, based on internal Project Veritas documents, the group ran a sting, cod...

James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Mal...

Vincent Marzello didn’t expect to be chatting with a stranger. The 65-year-old from West Lebanon, New Hampshire, sat at a computer in his local library, where he could get 30 minutes of internet, his only real online access. As Marzello remembers it, a youngish, blonde man struck up a conversation: he was from California, had just moved to the area. Then the man suddenly pivoted, musing aloud that he might have voted twice. An odd thing to mention to someone you’d just met; a confession to a ...

When James Mitchell started crafting the CIA’s so-called “torture program” more than a decade ago, he knew he’d eventually end up in front of a military court. But that doesn’t mean he was happy when that day finally arrived.

With more states legalizing recreational marijuana, enforcing DUI laws becomes more complicated. Alcohol intoxication can be easily measured during a traffic stop—the driver just blows into a tube—but testing for pot requires blood, urine, or hair samples, and results only show whether someone has THC in their system, not whether they’re currently under the influence.
That’s got scientists—and venture-backed entrepreneurs—racing for a better way: a breathalyzer for weed. California startup Ho...

On September 6, federal health officials warned the public that a mysterious illness linked to vaping had killed five people in the U.S. Kansas officials confirmed on September 10 that a sixth person has died and California health officials said on September 17 that a seventh person had died from vaping-related illness. At least 450 cases of vaping-associated illness are suspected in hospitals across 33 states and one territory, with the numbers continuing to rise.
Those hospitalized are most...

Our civilization is sleepwalking its way toward near-certain doom thanks to global climate change. Most hours, that plays out in a dim drumbeat of disquieting, but manageable-feeling catastrophes: sneakily rising waters, shrinking water supplies, an increase in paralytic shellfish poisoning. Reading the news can be an exercise in studiously not connecting the dots, so as to not be consumed by a very necessary rage. We’re having to learn how to mourn a glacier, for God’s sake.
Sometimes this f...

James Mitchell is often referred to as the “architect” of the CIA’s so-called “torture program,” a system developed to question suspected terrorists at “black sites” around the world after 9/11. But to hear Mitchell tell it, what he saw wasn’t much of a system at all — and he certainly wasn’t in charge of it.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency created an archipelago of “black sites” around the world. The secret campuses were for conducting “enhanced interrogation”—that is, officially sanctioned torture—on suspected terrorists. “We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will,” Vice President Dick Cheney told the public at the time. “We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.”
In 2005, the CIA destroyed more than 90 v...