I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Sujatha Gidla in LitHub: "When people in this country ask me what it means to be an untouchable, I explain that caste is like racism against blacks here. But then they ask, “How does anyone know what your caste is?” I explain it like this. In Indian villages
From Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: "When Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden was published in 1986, it changed our reading of the author’s life and work. Uncompleted at his death in 1961, the Garden manuscript revealed the “depth of his interest in homosexuality and the
From Ilir Gashi at The Guardian: "Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it’s legal and can fit
From Marcus Webb for Delayed Gratification magazine: "I remember every moment of my fall,” says Lijana Wallenda, one of the fourth generation of the Wallenda family to perform on a high wire – and, in 2017, the latest member to suffer a horrific accident. “I can see the ground getting
From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: "Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline — in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. “At first, we were like, ‘Look how cute?’ But
From Erik Wills for GQ magazine: "When he first alighted on the scene, Jason Belmonte – or Belmo, as he’s known to his fans – resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which
From Dalya Alberge for The Guardian: "A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a civil servant has been identified as the only surviving handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer, revered as the father of English literature. While it was known that the individual seeking a leave of absence was
From Lars Wegner for VG: "On 3 June 1995, a young woman is found dead on the bed in Room 2805 of the Oslo Plaza, shot through the forehead with a Browning 9 mm pistol. She checked in as Jennifer Fergate, but the name is false. Who is this
Rachel Nuwer writes for the BBC: "In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch when Mike Bremmer, de Wit's research assistant, appeared at her office
From Kevin Dickinson at Big Think: "Ancient Akkadian is an early Semitic language that was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. Hundreds of thousands — by some accounts more than a million — Akkadian texts
Drik Schulze-Makuch writes for Big Think: "In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. At the time of those landings, scientists had very little understanding of the Martian environment.
From Bryan Burrough at Texas Monthly magazine: "They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading