I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From the New York Times: "It was the kind of tragic accident that reverberates through a community: a first-year college student, out late in New York City on New Year’s Eve, falls onto the subway tracks and is killed by an oncoming train. Word of the 19-year-old’s
From Jonathan Nunn for The Guardian: "If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start
By Kevin Hazzard for The Atavist: "Today the role is clearly defined: A paramedic is certified to practice advanced emergency medical care outside a hospital setting. They’re the people who shock hearts back into beating, insert breathing tubes into tracheas, and deliver pharmaceuticals intravenously whenever and wherever a
From NPR: "The strange journey of Einstein's brain began on the evening of April 17, 1955, when the seventy-six-year-old physicist was admitted to Princeton Hospital complaining of chest pains. He died early the next morning of a burst aortic aneurysm. As in the cases of Carl Gauss
From Alex Morris for Rolling Stone: "After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.
From Marginal Revolution: "The NYC police union gives out what are called 'courtesy cards' to friends and family, who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. The cards even come in gold, silver and bronze. An officer who is presented
From Andrew Keh for the NYT: "Ed Martin III was 14 years old when he began working at his father’s pet cemetery, and in the decades since he has tended to the graves of innumerable dogs, many cats, flocks of birds, a few monkeys, a lion cub, a
From Thomas Lake for CNN: "Johnny Gosch left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in late summer, in the pale morning light before sunrise. Just before 6 a.m., a neighbor heard a wagon rattling through the yard and figured it was Johnny taking his usual
From Truly Adventurous: "Tim Todd spent a quiet and, by all appearances, happy weekend with his wife, Patti. First thing Monday he went to meet his boss, private security kingpin Bill Pagano, to solidify his plans to have her killed. Bill, the former police chief of the small town
From Jimi Olaghere for MIT Tech Review: "I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it contained a consent form to participate in a clinical trial for a new gene-editing drug
From Ted Gioia: "Crosby had to do two different live broadcasts, and the network refused his proposal that they pre-record the later show on 16-inch transcription disks, since the sound quality was noticeably inferior. In 1947, a stranger from Northern California named Jack Mullin made the trek to Hollywood
From Jon Schuppe for NBC: "The unclaimed dead of Hinds County, Mississippi, are buried along a dirt road on the grounds of a jail work farm, their graves marked with just a metal rod and a number. For centuries, the solemn duty of burying people who died with no