I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you. Some customers snap up entire rolls, three hundred dollars’ worth of tickets, and
Peter Schjeldahl, a poet who was also the longtime art critic for the New Yorker, died recently at the age of 80. He wrote a piece called "The Art of Dying" in 2019, after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. "Why me? Why not me?," he
In the mid-1800s, travelers moving up and down the Hudson River would have been witness to an abnormal sight: Mayan ruins and artifacts a thousand miles north of where they should be. Some of the settlers in that area seem to have felt something of an inferiority complex toward the
Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at
One June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. He hurried into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front desk
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Aluminum metalized polyethylene
Standard ultrasound is popular in clinical settings because it is minimally invasive, low-cost, portable, and can generate images in real time. But it has rarely been used to image the brain. That’s partly because the skull gets in the way—bone tends to scatter ultrasound waves—and the technology
When Daniel Larsen was in middle school, he started designing crossword puzzles. He had to layer the hobby on top of his other interests: chess, programming, piano, violin. He twice qualified for the Scripps National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C. He is the youngest person to publish a crossword
In this illustrated first-person account for The Guardian in the UK, Savannah Brooks talks about how the effects of "long COVID" have impacted her life: "I was five when I started playing soccer; thirteen when I started playing lacrosse; seventeen when I started kickboxing; twenty-seven when I
For nearly 150 years, a cloud has hung over the reputation of Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of “The Canterbury Tales,” long seen as the founder of the English literary canon. A court document discovered in 1873 suggested that around 1380, Chaucer had been charged with raping Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter
After taking a few steps back to get a running start, Hadj Benhalima dashed toward the building, pushed against its wall with his foot, propelled himself upward and stretched out his arm. At the peak of his leap, he flipped off a light switch, more than 10 feet off the
Everyone knows that the Wright brothers made aviation history when they lifted off at Kitty Hawk on Dec. 17, 1903. But the history of flight is a little different when it's told in Brazil -- there, the honor for being the first goes to Alberto Santos-Dumont. The Brazilians