I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Saturday was the anniversary of the birth of the Italian painter who made perhaps the biggest art repatriation blunder in history. In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia stole da Vinci’s masterpiece from Paris and later brought it to Florence. But the theft’s success as a repatriation effort was very short-lived.
In San Jose, California, kindergarteners are sitting at the edge of an outdoor pool when a sleek two-meter-long mass breaches in front of them, water dripping off its smooth gray skin. It stops and enthusiastically nods, splashing the children as their jaws drop in awe. A thin, barely perceptible cord
On a balmy October day in 2017, Ana Belén Pintado decided to clear out some space in her garage. Her father, Manuel, died in 2010, followed by her mother, Petra, four years later. Their belongings sat gathering dust at her home in Campo de Criptana, a small town in the
Jack Thomas writes: "I’ve been a journalist for more than 60 years. So after doctors delivered the news, I sat down to do what came naturally, if painfully: Write this story." As a teenager, Thomas says he often wondered how his life would change if he knew
Gloria Doerr was at home when she learned that her late father, Paul Alfred Doerr, had been linked to one of the most notorious murder sprees of the twentieth century. Her son had stumbled on a podcast interview with Jarett Kobek, a best-selling novelist based in Los Angeles, who wrote
Susie Goodall wanted to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat without stopping. She didn’t bargain for what everyone else wanted. In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small, red-hulled sailboat tossed and rolled, at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest. The boat’s mast
The Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: “To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again.” Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital — and, according to
On September 7, 1674, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek sent a letter to London’s Royal Society detailing an astonishing discovery. While he was examining algae from a nearby lake through his homemade microscope, a creature “with green and very glittering little scales,” which he estimated to be a thousand times smaller
The members of Longevity House are united by two things, this Toronto Life magazine feature says: a willingness to hand over $100,000 and a burning desire to live forever. At a recent gathering, "they sipped brain-boosting beverages laced with lion’s mane mushrooms and garnished with grapefruit, participated
Ben Pearson writes about how movie dialogue seems to be more and more difficult to understand every day. "It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when
A golf cart-sized spacecraft will intentionally smash into a tiny asteroid at about 14,000 miles per hour on September 26. It's humanity's first test of our ability to deflect dangerous incoming space rocks. NASA currently knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000 nearby
Lots of TV shows have special guest stars – usually celebrities of some kind – but Star Trek: Voyager is unusual in that one of its shows featured an actual prince, the man who later became King Abdullah II of Jordan. Abdullah's cameo was arranged as a surprise for him