I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From GWAS: "The first reports of deaths in patients who received the human growth hormone surfaced in 1985 both in the USA and UK. Post-mortem examinations revealed that all the deaths were due to a prion disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which led the government to shut down the
From Ara The Rat: "In 2001, two boys playing in the woods in Radnor, Pennsylvania, found a strange three-foot sealed PVC pipe hidden inside a concrete drain. Inside, they discovered documents relating to numerous bank robberies and instructions on how to clean a Baretta firearm. Police found a three
From Inverse: "George Lucas didn’t plan on making Darth Vader the secret father of Luke Skywalker. As much as fans have been told that Lucas had a massive plan for the Star Wars saga prior to 1977, the sources closest to that process say the opposite. “When I
From JSTOR Daily: "According to new DNA findings, General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish aristocrat who aided the American Revolution as the Father of the American Cavalry, seems to have been intersex. That is, a person who combines both male and female traits. In Pulaski’s case, the bodily remains
From The Chronicle: "In the 1930s, the married anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had seen themselves as scientists seeking to expand the accepted limits of “normal” human behavior, communication, and consciousness. By the 1940s they came to believe that their project could help ensure the survival of humanity
From The Smithsonian: "In the summer of 1978. A helicopter was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into a thickly wooded valley. Then the pilot saw something that should not have been there: a clearing, 6,000 feet up a
From the WSJ: "University of Florida officials went back and forth with documentary filmmaker Jo Franklin, an alumnus, over details for a planned gala in her honor at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. She had pledged $2 million to her alma mater, and her guest list included the
From Outside magazine: "Talon Vance, 13, lived in an apartment complex in suburban Colorado Springs with his mom and Aunt. Other relatives lived nearby. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in
From Big Think: "Seven countries each have staked a claim to a slice of Antarctica, but all those claims have been frozen by the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. Together, those claims cover most of the continent at the bottom of the world — except Marie Byrd Land, which is the
From Toronto Life magazine: "Amira and Nadya Gill were well-known on campus. The ambitious twins seemed to excel at everything they did. Amira was pursuing her master’s in civil engineering, and she was a reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces. Nadya, a former NCAA soccer player, juggled her
From The Guardian: "The last time Diane Foley spoke to her son Jim was in November 2012, when he called her at work in New Hampshire. Foley, a nurse practitioner at the clinic where her husband, John, was a doctor, was relieved to hear her son’s voice. A
From The Economist: "New species are generally found rather than awakened. And they are typically discovered in remote places like rainforests or Antarctic plateaus. But not so a species of bacterium described in a paper just published in Extremophiles. The bug is new to science, but it is not