I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From The Guardian: "More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina. A photo shows the painting,
From the Smithsonian: "During the late 19th century, in the years following the Civil War, Americans—mostly ailing veterans—were hooked on morphine. Syringes, which were sold at drugstores, allowed people to administer the opiate themselves. So with a morphine epidemic sweeping the country, Bayer offered a hot new
From Toronto Life: "It was the middle of the night, a Wednesday in early April, when the first bag of A&W french fries was deposited on my neighbour’s porch. Nobody saw who put it there, but when my neighbour opened her door to get her mail
From Astral Codex Ten: "Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company
From NDTV: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's bodyguards reportedly carried a "poop suitcase" to collect his faecal waste during the Friday Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, as reported by The Express US. The unusual security measure was said to be aimed at preventing foreign
From Popular Mechanics: "After 500 years, researchers finally understand the anatomical function of a heart feature first described by Leonardo da Vinci. To find the answer, scientists used fractal theory, MRIs, and a lot of computational elbow grease to shed light on structures called trabeculae. They found this branching,
From The Smithsonian: "It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color and life more than 230,000 miles away. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and
From Veterans Breakfast Club: "You’ve heard of Japanese Kamikazes in World War II, but probably not Kaiten, the underseas version of the famous suicide attacks on Navy warships in 1944-1945. Kaiten was a top-secret manned torpedo program where the Japanese pilots would be sealed into explosive-
From LitHub: "One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city, nearly
From ProPublica: "Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective — passed away recently at the age of 50. She became convinced she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from
From New York: "Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies
From Wired: "Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to