I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From the WSJ: "Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The
From The New Yorker: "For Wilson Bentley, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century microphotographic innovator and bona-fide snowflake obsessive, contemplating the dazzling panoply of kaleidoscopic snow-crystal formations was a pastime that never lost its lustre. In fact, it is through Bentley’s encyclopedic collection of more than five thousand snowflake photographs,
From CNN: "The patient consulted a doctor about a chronic cough that was concerning him. During his first couple months of treatment, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, thickening and stiffness in the right lung, and bronchiectasis, or damage of the breathing tubes. When the patient finally reached Munavvar’s
From MIT: "Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near
From The Guardian: "A humpback whale briefly scooped a kayaker into its mouth off the Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed in an incident caught on camera. Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of
From National Geographic: "Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for
From Defector: "If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn't notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them. That problem cost $43,000, a sum that represented the
From Discover Music: "No matter how memorable Bobby Fuller’s signature hit was – and his version of “I Fought The Law” is inarguably a classic rock’n’roll record of any era – it always risks being upstaged by the macabre and never-explained circumstances of his death. Born on October
From The Oxford Clarion: "The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the
From the NYT: "In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was
From The Smithsonian: "On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids
From USC: Oneida. For most Americans, the name conjures up fine silverware. Few are aware that behind this secular symbol of middle-class respectability lies the story of a 19th-century religious community predicated on radical notions of equality, sex and religion. The community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the scion