I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Janice Kai Chen for the Washington Post: "Internet speeds have come a long way since the days of the dial-up modem, but sometimes you can’t beat the millennia-old method of carrier pigeon. Ancient Greeks used the so-called rats of the sky to spread results of the Olympic
From Hilary Hanson for HuffPost: "In the wake of orcas attacking boats around Portugal and Spain, sailors are turning to unorthodox tactics in an attempt to deter them. One piece of advice going around is to blast heavy metal music underwater to keep orcas away. But a marine mammal
From Lucy Davies for the BBC: "In the 1930s, Jasper Maskelyne was a superstar magician, performing to sell-out crowds at variety theatres all over Britain. A 1931 poster for his stint at the London Palladium billed him "England's Greatest Illusionist". Maskelyne's greatest hoax
From Anita Singh for The Telegraph: "The Princes in the Tower were not murdered by Richard III but spirited to Europe and later tried to retake the crown, according to new research. Philippa Langley, the amateur historian credited with finding Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park, has
From Valentine Faure for The Atlantic: "At the small elementary school in France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents. It was the late 1940s, a time when whispered stories like this one passed from parents to children. Women who were
From Andy Greenberg: "Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken. Users cataloged an alarming number of other digital services that were victims of the outage:
From Marco Hernandez at the New York Times: "Hamas militants have built a maze of hidden tunnels some believe extend across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control. And they are not mere tunnels. Snaking beneath dense residential areas, the passageways allow fighters to move around
From Scott Sayare at New York magazine: "The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that “all Government records related to the assassination” be provided to the National Archives and made available to the public. Among the first visitors to the JFK Assassination Records Collection
From Max Marshall for Vanity Fair: "At a press conference held during the 2016 College of Charleston summer break, the police chief announced one of the largest drug busts in the city’s history, a collaboration between local police, state law enforcement, the DEA, the FBI, and the US
From Dave Burkey for Jax Examiner: "They called him the Black Swallow, and from the beginning of his life, all he wanted to do was get to France.He was born in Georgia, his father a former slave from Haiti, his mother full-blooded Cree. He ran away while still
From Vanessa Vaselka for the Smithsonian: "Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877, was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the
From Alex Mar for The Guardian: "In the spring of 1985, Paula Cooper was 15 and on her lunch break at Lew Wallace high school in Indiana. She and her friends Karen and April decided to skip their afternoon classes and head over to Candyland Arcade around the corner.