I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From History.com: “On November 9, 1959—just two-and-a-half weeks before Thanksgiving—the U.S. secretary of Health, Education and Welfare made a startling announcement: some cranberries grown in the Pacific Northwest may have been contaminated by a weed killer that could lead to cancer in rats. This meant that
From The Atlantic: "3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’
From the LRB: "In the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. When Howard takes the painting to a London dealer, he explains that it had belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, who had lived
From Vulture: "Airing as the final sketch of the Christopher Walken-hosted April 8, 2000, episode, “More Cowbell” has leaped from Studio 8H’s gold-plated diapers into cultural ubiquity. The phrase has even merited an entry into the dictionary. (Idiom, informal: “An extra quality that will make something or someone
From Sunday Long Read: "One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon. He’
From Slate: "Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori
From Daily KOS: "On Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would-be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden. At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum,
From Vanity Fair: "Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the
From the BBC: "Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy. Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm. More than
From RR Auction: "A previously unknown 8mm color film capturing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963, has been sold for $137,500 at auction. The silent color footage, shot by local truck driver Dale Carpenter, Sr., captures the presidential motorcade moving through downtown Dallas, followed
From The Weather Network: "The Nazis managed to install an automatic weather station on the coast of Labrador during WWII and it remained undiscovered by Canadians for more than 30 years. The secret German mission remains one of the only known enemy operations to actually take place on North
From Science News: "In December 1855 and January 1856, a trio of vessels set sail from the United States to Jarvis and Baker islands, coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The ships carried representatives from the American Guano Company and a guano expert tasked with examining the quality of