I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Manon Bischoff from Scientific American writes: "Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. The island, along with its neighbor Corsica, is located on a particularly secure block of Earth's crust that is among the most stable areas of the Mediterranean, with very few earthquakes
From David Gauvey Herbert in NY Mag: "In January 2010, a team of detectives and a prosecutor flew to Philadelphia to present a case to a league of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, which met once a month to listen to the facts of cold cases. The group’
The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. By early September, the outbreak began to subside. Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear
Ashawnta Jackson writes for JSTOR Daily: "Elizabeth Wilkinson had a score to settle. Writing to the London Journal in 1722, she informs its readers that she and Hannah Highfield 'had some words.' And though words might have started it, they weren’t going to end it. Wilkinson
A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete who spent 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave outside Granada with no contact with the outside world said the time flew by, and she did not want to come out. Beatriz Flamini, an elite sportswoman and mountaineer, is said to
Trung Phan writes: "Hello Kitty has been around since 1974 and, as recently as 2013, was selling $8 billion worth of merchandise annually. Hello Kitty merchandise has made $89B in lifetime sales, which is roughly equal to the combined all-time sales for Batman, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and
The first Star Wars movies were filmed in a number of exotic locations: The lush and dense California Redwoods served as the forest moon of Endor, Hoth scenes were filmed on the frozen tundra of Norway's Hardangerjokulen Glacier, and the set of the Lars Homestead was famously built
If you're driving through Britain, you might see giant concrete blocks with concave openings. What are they? Acoustic mirrors. More than 100 years ago, these mirrors were built along the coast of England, with the intention of using them to detect the sound of approaching German zeppelins. Invented
Harry Lorayne had an international career as a memory expert, rattling off entire small-town telephone books and telling astonished audiences what was written on any page of a given issue of Time magazine. Mr. Lorayne was not a mnemonic freak. He was born with quite ordinary powers of recall,
In the 1800s, counterfeiting became extremely common, and the one person acknowledged as America’s greatest counterfeiter was Benjamin Boyd. Boyd used to work for a Chicago syndicate run by James “Big Jim” Kinealy. However, Abraham Lincoln’s legislation to arrest counterfeiters resulted in Boyd being sentenced to prison in
History remembers him as Jimmy Carter’s closest childhood friend. In his best-selling memoirs and poetry, the former president detailed his adventures with Alonzo “A.D.” Davis, the nephew of Black tenant farmers who labored on Carter family land in Depression-era southwest Georgia. The boys grew up together,
On Friday, February 21, 1986 a group of 300 scientists, engineers, contractors and government officials gathered for a dedication ceremony at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After final diagnostic tests, the "Mirror Fusion Test Facility-B" (MFTF-B) completion was celebrated, and a letter from John Herrington, Ronald Regan&