I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Boing Boing: "For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia (a neurological condition that limits muscle movements and motor skills), was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled. He was diagnosed with autism at age 2. It wasn't
From The Times: "The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024. The sender was a man calling himself Charles Chen, who said he was an international student at Stanford. I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with
From NBC: "Finland’s air force, now part of NATO, still flies swastikas on a handful of unit flags — but is preparing to phase them out, largely to avoid awkwardness with its Western allies. The history of the Finnish air force’s use of the swastika, which since the
From Kottke: "Giles Clement, also known as Polymatt, decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. In a YouTube video where he breaks down the process, he says: "I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one
From MIT Tech: "On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base’
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 in Peru
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