I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
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
From Elamin Abdelmahmoud for Rolling Stone: "Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. He went to the South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’
From Jacobo Prisco for CNN: "In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function, confirmed a spokesperson from the city’s Department of Transportation in an email. That number has steadily decreased in recent years: When the New York Times revealed that the
From Sean Thomas for The Independent: "Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry. The story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for