I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From the New York Times: "Alexander wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian
From the Wall Street Journal: "Vladimir Putin has an illegitimate daughter living under a pseudonym in Paris, where she works as a DJ, Ukrainian media has reported. The 21-year-old, who goes by the name of either Luiza Rozova or Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, was tracked down by a Ukrainian TV
From The Guardian: "I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world,” said American women’s suffragist Frances Willard in the 1800s, epitomising how bicycles were caught up with women’s rights and social reform in the US. Back then the image of a
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