Robert Samuels

Feb 8, 2025 | washingtonpost.com | Robert Samuels

WICHITA — The most disorienting week in the history of American figure skating started with a familiar mix of promise and nostalgia. Blocks away from the ice rink where some of the nation’s best athletes leaped, twirled and left the crowd gasping, a group of the sport’s old guard convened in a hotel ballroom on Jan. 25 for the induction ceremony for the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame.

Jan 27, 2025 | washingtonpost.com | Robert Samuels

WICHITA — Even the fall felt like a flourish. In Ilia Malinin’s final skate at this year’s national figure skating championships, the reigning world found himself flat on his back, an image so anathema to his competitive steel that it elicited both gasps and snickers from the crowd. Nonetheless, Malinin overpowered the field — he finished more than forty points ahead of the second-place finisher — by employing a flurry of quadruple jumps that no man in the world can match.

Nov 3, 2024 | adn.com | Robert Samuels

MILWAUKEE - On the Saturday morning Whitley Riley woke up to cast her ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris, she noticed a Facebook message from a cousin pleading for a more radical change. “Everyone should vote for cornel west for president!!” the cousin wrote, because she was fed up with both the Democrat and former president Donald Trump. “Literally anybody else.”“I am not sure my people are taking this seriously,” Riley, 24, told herself.

Nov 3, 2024 | msn.com | Robert Samuels

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Nov 3, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Robert Samuels

Whitley Riley, top left, and her mother Linda Riley, second from top left, wait in line to vote at the Washington Park Library’s early voting location in Milwaukee in late October. (Joel Angel Juarez)After losing her father during the pandemic, a young Wisconsin voter tries to persuade her community to vote in unprecedented numbers.