I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
In the fall of 1940, Thomas Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. He took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to everything, and designed a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed.
In the town of Bungamati, Nepal, above an ancient spring, stand two stone shrines and a temple. One of those shrines has a large hole where a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, the Hindu protector god, used to be. Carved by master artisans nearly a thousand years ago, the sandstone god
Brenda Leyland was a stylish, well-spoken and rather private woman who lived in a picturesque village in Leicestershire. Her son Ben knew she told stories, and that some of them may have been on the tall side. He also knew that she spent a lot of time on her
In November 1949, Chien-Shiung Wu and her graduate student, Irving Shaknov, descended to a laboratory below Columbia University's Pupin Hall. They needed antimatter for a new experiment, so they made their own, using a machine called a cyclotron. Their evidence suggested that pairs of photons from particle
Marie Tharp spent the fall of 1952 hunched over a drafting table, surrounded by charts, graphs, and jars of India ink. Nearby, spread across several additional tables, lay her project—the largest and most detailed map ever produced of a part of the world no one had ever seen. For
At the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting in Las Vegas, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, announced that he and his team had achieved a century-old dream of the field: a superconductor that works at room temperature and near-room pressure. Interest was so
Historian Rebecca Simon writes: Anne Bonny made an unforgettable impression from the bow of the pirate ship, Revenge, in the 1700s. Beautiful with fiery red hair that matched her temperament, she’d patrol the ship wearing a jacket and trousers, with a handkerchief tied around her head. Though forced to
When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but
In 1952, the United States military needed leaders for a new kind of mission. It involved a treacherous journey into unexplored territory, with danger a certainty. But 28-year-old Navy Lt. James Earl Carter Jr. answered the call. “Unexplored territory,” in this case, was the aftermath of one of
Jutting out of the permafrost on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, the entrance to the world’s “doomsday” seed vault is worthy of any James Bond movie. Surrounded by snow, ice and the occasional polar bear, the facility houses 1.2 million seed samples from every corner
Libby Jackson, the Head of Space Exploration in the UK, says that there is “no way” humans are the only life form in the universe. Jackson reportedly continued by saying that the existence of aliens isn’t a question of if but more a question of when we’ll find
The Lou Reed-loving Czech rock group The Plastic People of the Universe may well be the only covers band to ever alter the course of history. After tanks from the Warsaw Pact countries rolled into Prague in 1968, curtailing the liberalising and reformist Alexander Dubček, bands were told to