I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From The Cut: "Fifty miles northwest of New York City is a town built as a kind of experiment: an attempt to insulate a religious community from the vagaries of time and assimilation. There, the women serve Sabbath meals that would not be out of place in 19th-century Eastern
From Popular Science: "When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a
From The Smithsonian: "An upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by a mysterious artist who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement,
From MessyNessyChic: "When we think of Parisian café culture, we might think of the literary crowd that congregated at the Café de Flore with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in the 1950s. Who would have thought that we owe it all to an industrious community of coal-shovelling
From the New York Times: "Why did Beethoven go deaf? A cottage industry of fans and experts has debated various theories. Was it Paget’s disease of bone, which in the skull can affect hearing? Did irritable bowel syndrome cause his gastrointestinal problems? Or might he have had syphilis,
From the Tampa Bay Times: "When Beach Park's Howard Hilton was planning the Great Tampa Snow Show, he envisioned smiling kids, Santa Claus spreading good cheer, frolicking reindeer and lots of snow. A giant Christmas tree would hulk over the festivities, and there would be a massive,
From the MIT Press: "In water nearly 6 kilometers deep, the scientists drilled 100 meters into the seafloor. They found microbes all the way to the bottom of the cores, albeit not as many as in the richer areas closer to the surface. The scientists estimated that the deepest
From CBS News: "Two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize. The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean
From JSTOR Daily: "Before he became the founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer was a Spiritualist and practitioner of animal magnetism. Palmer claimed to have received communication from a deceased physician who taught him the principles of chiropractic—a term he invented in 1896, combining the Greek words cheir
From the NYT: "Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke,
From Now I Know: "In 2006, 21-year-old Kris married Brandon Smith, the boy she had been dating throughout most of high school and beyond. But two years into their marriage, tragedy struck. Brandon was in a car accident and barely survived. It took two months before Brandon regained consciousness,
From John Hawks: "The poster is a dentist and visited his parents house to see the new travertine they installed. It's no surprise that he recognized something right away: A section cut at a slight angle through a very humanlike jaw. The Reddit user who posted the