Hylton began publishing articles in
The Baltimore Sun as a teenager, and was writing for major magazines by his early twenties. climbed the Ecuadorean
Andes for
Details, and wrote about
Hugh Hefner for
Rolling Stone. At 24, Hylton was hired as a Contributing Editor at Esquire, where he wrote about the
invasion of Afghanistan, attempts to patent the
human genome, and the prosecution of alleged nuclear spy
Wen Ho Lee. After the
2003 invasion of Iraq, Hylton became a Washington Correspondent for
GQ, publishing criticism of the war and drafting articles of impeachment for
Dick Cheney. He was the first journalist to interview
Joe Darby, the whistleblower at
Abu Ghraib prison. Hylton was hired by
The New York Times Magazine as a Contributing Writer in 2010. Hylton has written for the magazine about
bioterrorism, the search for
Air France Flight 447, the influence of
Breitbart News, and the prosecution of police officers after the death of
Freddie Gray. His February 8, 2015 article about the
family detention policy to imprison Central American women and children was cited by a federal judge in an injunction to suspend the policy two weeks later. His 2016 profile of the painter
Chuck Close was a finalist for the
National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. In 2018, Hylton stated on
The Daily that he was conducting secret interviews with the Venezuelan opposition leader
Leopoldo López, who at the time was under house arrest. Hylton is a recipient of the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism by the
Medill School of Journalism and his articles have been anthologized in the books "Best Political Writing," "Best Music Writing," and "Best Business Stories." He is a Special Lecturer at
Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the
MFA program in
creative nonfiction at
Goucher College. ==Personal life==