I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From the FT: "There was nothing to suggest that October 22 1966 would be anything other than a typically dismal Saturday at Wormwood Scrubs, a dingy Victorian prison in north-west London. Late that afternoon, inmate 455 told a guard that the idea of spending his free time watching TV
From Amusing Planet: "Joseph Pujol was born in Marseille, on the Cote d'Azur in 1857. The son of a stonemason and sculptor, Pujol discovered his unique talent when he was only ten years old. Pujol soon found that by adjusting the force with which he expelled this
From the Sunday Times: "At 18, he graduates from high school with excellent grades but is unemployable. He moves into an annexe, is looked after by a rotating team of carers and spends much of his time deeply absorbed in World of Warcraft, his right hand resting awkwardly on
From Science.org: "In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division
From Nautilus: "If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them. Clearly,
From the BBC: "The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed - after 31 years. The message was posted by Michel Becker, who illustrated the original Chouette
From The Smithsonian: "In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services told his scientists to find a way to outfox the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake
From MIT Tech Review: "Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov hates going to the front line. The risks terrify him. But to perform his particular self-appointed role in the Russia-Ukraine war, he believes it’s critical to exchange the relative safety of his suburban home north of the capital for places where
From Scientific American: "Quantum physicists are familiar with wonky, seemingly nonsensical phenomena: atoms and molecules sometimes act as particles, sometimes as waves; particles can be connected to one another by a “spooky action at a distance,” even over great distances; and quantum objects can detach themselves from their properties
From Gizmodo: "It took a century for researchers to discover 430 geoglyphs, some massive, spread across the ground in the Nazca region of Peru. Now, a team of scientists has nearly doubled the count of known geoglyphs in just six months, using an AI-driven approach to reveal some of
From the Montreal Gazette: "Want to prolong life? To start with, you need three corpses from healthy young men accidentally killed in within the previous 12 hours. Then you remove tissue from their spleen and bone marrow and grind these in a mortar with saline solution. Centrifuge this mixture
From Cascadia News: "Robert Schock, 39, set off for a day run in the North Cascades at the end of July with minimal supplies and his dog. He was in an adventurous mood and wanted to piece together a big loop, possibly by way of Copper Ridge, which has