I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Marco Giancotti at Nautilus: "A synthetic female voice speaks into my ears over the electronic clamor: “top hat.” I close my eyes and I imagine a top hat. For most people, this should be a rather simple exercise, perhaps even satisfying. For me, it’s a considerable strain,
From David Pierson at the New York Times: "The boy had seemed destined for a life of affluence and earthly pursuits. Born into the family behind a major mining conglomerate in Mongolia, he might have been picked to someday lead the company from its steel-and-glass headquarters in the country’
From Stephanie Clifford at Esquire: "I met Leon in the fall of 1993, when we were new sophomores at Phillips Exeter Academy, a competitive New Hampshire boarding school. He seemed instantly at ease—tall, with excellent posture, a puffed-out chest, and an easy grin. He made the soccer team
From Joaquim Salles for Atlas Obscura: "Just off the coast of Astoria, Queens, at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers, is a narrow tidal channel. Hell Gate. Its fast currents change multiple times a day and it used to be riddled with rocks just beneath the surface.
From Tom Donaghy for The Atavist: "In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge
From Andreas Babst for Neue Zircher Zeitung: "In 1969, the Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan's first luxury hotel, opened. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than forty years. Rulers came and went, and every
From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: "Flamboyant, swashbuckling cross-dressing was nothing new in late nineteenth-century France. Paris’s unique and bohemian lesbian subculture allowed these women to thrive, though it was still illegal for French women to wear pants in public. Yet despite the dangers and the occasional assaults,
From Middle East Monitor: "In an effort to modernise while maintaining its Islamic character, Iran is exploring the use of artificial intelligence to assist its religious seminaries. The initiative is centred in the holy city of Qom, home to half of its 200,000 Shia clerics and Iran’s
From Anika Burgess for Atlas Obscura: "They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities. The Pack Horse Library
From Phil Hoad for Atlas Obscura: "Months after he buried it in darkness, Régis Hauser still dreamed of the hole he dug at 3:30 a.m. on April 24, 1993, three feet deep somewhere in France. How he lugged the hunk of metal from his car trunk and
From Robert Worth for The Atlantic: "On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he
From David Shiffman at Hakai magazine: "Long before they started chomping on yachts, killer whales were making headlines for a rash of attacks on South African great white sharks. The killings were as gruesome as they were impressive. The killer whales were showing a deliberate sense of culinary preference,