I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
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:
From Marco Hernandez at the New York Times: "Hamas militants have built a maze of hidden tunnels some believe extend across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control. And they are not mere tunnels. Snaking beneath dense residential areas, the passageways allow fighters to move around
From Scott Sayare at New York magazine: "The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that “all Government records related to the assassination” be provided to the National Archives and made available to the public. Among the first visitors to the JFK Assassination Records Collection
From Max Marshall for Vanity Fair: "At a press conference held during the 2016 College of Charleston summer break, the police chief announced one of the largest drug busts in the city’s history, a collaboration between local police, state law enforcement, the DEA, the FBI, and the US
From Dave Burkey for Jax Examiner: "They called him the Black Swallow, and from the beginning of his life, all he wanted to do was get to France.He was born in Georgia, his father a former slave from Haiti, his mother full-blooded Cree. He ran away while still
From Vanessa Vaselka for the Smithsonian: "Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877, was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the
From Alex Mar for The Guardian: "In the spring of 1985, Paula Cooper was 15 and on her lunch break at Lew Wallace high school in Indiana. She and her friends Karen and April decided to skip their afternoon classes and head over to Candyland Arcade around the corner.
From Jacob Judah for MIT Tech Review: "Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with
From Emily Zarevich for JSTOR Daily: "It was exactly the kind of thing a reckless twenty-something-year-old would do. But why would a rational, academically accomplished, thirty-year-old philosophy teacher do it? For whatever reason, Sartre made the decision to get high on mescaline, used at the time to treat alcoholism
From Eamon Javers for CNBC: "As he was cheering on his team in LA in 2019, Jimmy Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. It was a 2012
From Michael Idov for GQ in 2011: "The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine: A young Russian film director had holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something. If the gossip was to be believed, this
From John Reed for Vice: "When I was four or five, sometimes I'd walk into my grandmother's bedroom to find her weeping. She'd be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. People were always dying around Grandma—her