I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From Slate: "Jan. 15 isn’t just National Bagel Day. It’s also National Strawberry Ice Cream Day, National Hat Day, and, of course, National Kombucha Day. Jan. 16, if you didn’t know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day.
From CrimeReads: "In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Alexander MacDonald had built the house in 1887. He lived there
From Wikipedia: "After Coltrane's death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this
From The Guardian: "One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across
From New York: “Gene Fleming was well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he lived on a sprawling, unusual estate — a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside . In September 1988, Fleming visited his brother-in-law‘s farm and noticed a new goose — it didn’t have
From NPR: "Beginning in 1940, a man named George Metesky hid 33 pipe bombs in public spaces in New York City. Twenty-two of those bombs exploded, injuring 15 people. Until he was captured in 1957, Metesky was known to the press, the police and an increasingly anxious populace as
From The Guardian: "During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe
From the BBC: "One of the world's most prolific blood donors - whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies - has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said
From Scientific American: "In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can
From the WSJ: "Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London
From National Geographic: "A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and
From the Wall Street Journal: "Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the