I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Jessica Watkins at Atlas Obscura: "I joined the national team as a junior in college. At the time, rugby wasn’t in the Olympics, so the women’s national team was working toward the Rugby World Cup. Eventually, I was able to participate, and a little bit later
From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: "If you visited the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain before 2012, you would have seen a fresco painted on its walls titled “Ecce Homo” (or “Behold the Man”), a depiction of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. Originally painted in
From Joe Biel: "Kittie Knox is the reason that bicycling is more than just another leisure sport for the wealthy. As a Black teenager, she created the world that she wanted to see from the seat of her bike. Today, you can see the results of Kittie’s success
From Patricia Lockwood at the LRB: "The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’ We are discussing the pope, who
From Kim Ju-Song for The Dial: "Aspiring writers in North Korea must register with the Korean Writers’ Union and participate in annual writing workshops. KWU editors evaluate each work on its ideological merits before allowing its publication. There are particularly strict rules regarding how the leaders and the Party
From Laura Kiniry for Atlas Obscura: "Four centuries ago, the settlers of a small French outpost perched on the north bank of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis River came up with the novel idea of founding an organization that would not only feed its members, but also uplift spirits during
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: