I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: "Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline — in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. “At first, we were like, ‘Look how cute?’ But
From Erik Wills for GQ magazine: "When he first alighted on the scene, Jason Belmonte – or Belmo, as he’s known to his fans – resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which
From Dalya Alberge for The Guardian: "A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a civil servant has been identified as the only surviving handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer, revered as the father of English literature. While it was known that the individual seeking a leave of absence was
From Lars Wegner for VG: "On 3 June 1995, a young woman is found dead on the bed in Room 2805 of the Oslo Plaza, shot through the forehead with a Browning 9 mm pistol. She checked in as Jennifer Fergate, but the name is false. Who is this
Rachel Nuwer writes for the BBC: "In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch when Mike Bremmer, de Wit's research assistant, appeared at her office
From Kevin Dickinson at Big Think: "Ancient Akkadian is an early Semitic language that was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. Hundreds of thousands — by some accounts more than a million — Akkadian texts
Drik Schulze-Makuch writes for Big Think: "In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. At the time of those landings, scientists had very little understanding of the Martian environment.
From Bryan Burrough at Texas Monthly magazine: "They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading
From Tara Isabella Burton for the Smithsonian magazine: "In the autumn of 1878, Thomas Alva Edison had a problem. He hadn’t invented the light bulb—yet. Or, to put it more precisely, he had invented a light bulb, but he couldn’t keep it lit for more than
From Gillian Brockell for the Washington Post: "The mystery of what happened to Emanuela Orlandi has been a national obsession in Italy for 40 years, as of this month, but it went international last year with the release of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.
Alex Goldman writes: "For years, there has been a popular conspiracy theory that goes like this: in 2016 the folks in charge at Disney, much like large swaths of the country, believed Hillary Clinton would win, and even before she was elected were hard at work on a Hillary
From Allison Meier at JSTOR Daily: "In the fall of 1886, New Yorkers were transported to the Battle of Gettysburg. That is to say, they flocked to a circular structure in downtown Brooklyn. The inside walls of the curious room were covered with a 360-degree painting, on which soldiers