I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Ironic Sans: "George Nissen didn’t invent the first ever trampoline, but he popularized trampolines for sports and recreation from the 1950s through the 1980s, and came up with new designs. One story tells how George and his son Ron tried to get a trampoline up to the
From The Guardian: "For years, scientists have known that several species spontaneously align their bodies with the earth’s magnetic field when engaging in certain behaviours. A team of 12 scientists from universities in Germany and the Czech Republic came together in a unique study that observed 37 breeds
From TechSpot: "In a freak series of seemingly random events, a Switch owner's pet fish accessed his eShop account and added funds to it using his credit card. The crime was caught on video during an unsupervised live stream. Hundreds of viewers watched as the little fish
From Nautilus: "Nikola Tesla — the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil — had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He was known to keep baskets in his room as nests,
From The Guardian: "When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years
From Engelsberg Ideas: "The first winter was the bloodiest. Some estimates suggest that Rosa Zemlyachka’s crew shot as many as 96,000 people in the space of four months (a tenth of the total population). Though Bela Kun’s attempt at revolution in Hungary had collapsed, he remained
From the Las Vegas Review Journal: "Groucho Marx called Alice Cooper ‘Coop,’ the way he used to do with actor Gary Cooper. He and the rock star met while dueting on 'Lidia the Tattooed Lady' at a Frank Sinatra birthday party. They became friends while living in
From Hacker News: "Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at an event in London how cybercriminals hacked an unnamed casino through its Internet-connected thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby of the casino. According to what Eagan claimed, the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the
From The Assembly: "Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone
From Slate: "29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to
From Nautilus: "Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of
From Nautilus: "In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the