I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
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
From the New York Times: "I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man; I’m a woman. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep
Editor's Note: Sorry to interrupt your reading, but I thought I would mention something that will hopefully make things easier for some of you. In yesterday's newsletter there was a story titled "The grift, the Indian prince, and a shocking twist," from a subscription
From Hannah Ghorashi for Air Mail: "My husband received a call from his acquaintance Amar Singh—a women’s-rights activist, art patron, film producer, and Indian prince—and said he a wild story to tell him. It concerned Amar’s relationship with a young Swedish woman named Liza-Johanna Holgersson,
From Jon Schuppe for NBC: "Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard. The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of
From Mike Baker for the New York Times: "Stacy Chapin walked into a conference ballroom at the annual CrimeCon gathering in Orlando, Fla., and let out a gasp. Nearly 3,000 people were packed inside, all to hear a college professor from Alabama conduct a “forensic analysis” of how
From Robert Kolker for the New York Times: "The beginning of the story was strangely familiar, like the opening scene in a shopworn police procedural: A woman runs screaming down a street in Oak Beach, a secluded gated community on Long Island’s South Shore, only to vanish, it
From Kate Yoder from Mother Jones: "One-third of American kitchens have gas stoves—and evidence is piling up that they’re polluting homes with toxic chemicals. A study this summer found that using a single gas stove burner on high can raise levels of cancer-causing benzene above what’s