I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
If you were one of the millions of children who grew up reading Goodnight Moon before bed, chances are its iconic green bedroom is permanently seared into your memory. Now, for the next four months, you have the opportunity to sleep in the Goodnight Moon room IRL. The Goodnight Moon
Brinlee Luster brushed off the exhaustion and stomach cramps as stress. She was finishing college, planning a wedding, and racing toward graduation. At first, the changes were easy to dismiss. A cold that wouldn't clear up. An unsettled, uncomfortable feeling in her gut that could be anxiety. Feeling
Olga Tsvyk got a job doing eyelash extensions, a skill she had picked up back home in Ukraine. In March 2016, a 40-something recent Russian immigrant named Viktoria Nasyrova walked into her salon. Nasyrova told Tsvyk that she was a masseuse and that she lived with her boyfriend in Brooklyn.
Rob Parsons and his wife Diane were listening to the radio and getting ready for Christmas on 23 December 1975 when they heard a knock at the door of their Cardiff home. The couple contemplated ignoring it – they’d already overcompensated the small carol singer murdering Once in Royal David’
The Kinzhal is one of Russia’s most fearsome missiles. Streaking at Mach 5.7 as high as 15.5 miles in the air, the 4.7-ton missile can deliver a 1,000-pound warhead over a distance of 300 miles. It’s so fast that Ukraine’s best kinetic air
Long before Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published in 1818, an author penned a story that resembles it on more than one account: François‐Félix Nogaret, Le Miroir des événemens actuals, ou la belle au plus offrant (The Looking Glass of Actuality, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder, 1790)
Before he found himself on the Al-Shahaniya racetrack on the outskirts of Doha, Esan Maruff had never seen a camel race. It was May 2005, and Maruff’s robotics team was on-site for a Qatar-funded research project — to make human jockeys obsolete by building a camel-racing robot. Looking back, he
With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation, and the notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Baden-Powell revealed how he and
As the Cold War simmered between the US and the Soviet Union, both nations proposed some pretty outlandish ideas, but one of the most mind-boggling was the once-classified plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. After the USSR made cosmic history by sending the world’s first artificial
It was the morning of November 1, 1918, and the end of his reign was nigh – that much was clear to Austria’s final emperor. He turned to a loyal servant, Lord High Steward Leopold Count Berchtold and put him in charge of a sensitive mission: to secret the Habsburg
The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone pillar. The man had wrapped his chisel in cloth to quiet his hammer strikes. Whenever there was some unexpected sound, he froze. The man working there
During his student days, Sam started to experiment with the idea of an artistic alter ego – a character to accompany his work. He turned up to give a third-year presentation in a fully doodled suit, replete with doodled accessories (fedora, briefcase), announcing he was The Doodle Man from Doodle Land.