I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Wikipedia: "John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons) was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet. In 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, a religious movement founded by English occultist Aleister Crowley. Parsons
From Eccentric Culinary History: "Prior to World War Two, pizza was barely known in the United States outside of a few Italian enclaves in the Northeast. For all of the praise heaped upon Lombardi’s in New York City, until the war, few people north of Houston Street had
From Lori Weiss at HuffPo: "Somewhere in West Tennessee, not far from Graceland, nine women – or "The 9 Nanas," as they prefer to be called – gather in the darkness of night. At 4am they begin their daily routine – a ritual that no one, not even their husbands,
From Atlas Obscura: "A locked vault in a Baghdad mosque contains a Quran written in lovely, sweeping Arabic calligraphy which, if not for its ink, could be displayed in a museum. But this holy book was written in blood — Saddam Hussein's blood, to be precise. Following an
From Chess.com: "Ossip Bernstein was born in 1882 in the small Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr. Although he wasn't serious about chess until his late adolescent years, he quickly made a name for himself while studying law in Germany. At nineteen, he almost earned the title of
From NY Mag: "Marcel Malanga was standing in the foyer of the Palais de la Nation, the home of the leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. It was just before dawn on May 19, 2024, and close by was
Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time in the last two years of this newsletter. I edit and publish this newsletter because I love
From the New York Times: "Annie Oakley, the most expert woman rifle shot ever known, died in Greenville, Ohio, a vivid and picturesque character known all over the world. Those who saw her at the height of her fame in the days of Buffalo Bill's Wild West
From Harper's: "Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was
From the BBC: “The Geiger counter starts flashing and buzzing as I hold it against the 100-year-old Parisian doorknob. I am standing in the doorway between the historical lab and office of Marie Curie, the Polish-born, Paris-based scientist who invented the word "radioactivity" – and here is an especially
From ABC.net: “Two men are walking down a desert track. They are from different worlds, but they have one thing in common. They know what it’s like to be alone in the vast outback wilderness of central Australia. They know how the heat sears your skin, the way
From Academia: “Daniel Hudson Burnham, the Chicago architect and city planner, is recognized for his work on the development of American tall office building; for the construction of World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; and for his city plans for Washington, D.C., Cleveland, San Francisco, and Chicago. What is