I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From ProPublica: "Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations. Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience
From Wikipedia: "James Carter was born in 1925 to a Mississippi sharecropping family and as a young man was several times an inmate of the Mississippi prison system. In 1959, Carter was a prisoner in a Mississippi State Penitentiary when Alan Lomax recorded him leading a group of prisoners
From CNN: "Traveling along the highways of Europe, a campervan named Stella Vita has driven almost 2,000 kilometers without stopping for fuel or plugging in to charge. Described as a self-sustaining house on wheels, the campervan has solar panels fitted to its roof and is powered by the
From Space.com: "Space is an airless vacuum, so technically, you can't smell anything. However, space is not a complete vacuum. It's full of all manner of molecules, some of which have their own strong odors when we smell them on Earth. During the Apollo
From the BBC: "In the early hours of 14 September 2019, Eleanor Paice jolted awake to the sound of smashing glass. Living in a staff flat above Blenheim Palace, the guest services supervisor was used to strange noises. But when fire alarms began to blare, she knew something was
From Atlas Obscura: "In 1997 — at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry — a man named Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to
From CBC: "Snowball fighting is a Canadian tradition which can run from the impromptu raid on passing pedestrians to an all-out war. It's also an international sport. Yukigassen, a Japanese word for "snow battle", takes a schoolyard snowball fight, and adds precision, professionalism, and competition.
From Marginal Revolution: "As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not
From The Ringer: "It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy! He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more
From Slate: "Jan. 15 isn’t just National Bagel Day. It’s also National Strawberry Ice Cream Day, National Hat Day, and, of course, National Kombucha Day. Jan. 16, if you didn’t know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day.
From CrimeReads: "In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Alexander MacDonald had built the house in 1887. He lived there
From Wikipedia: "After Coltrane's death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this