I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Hi everyone – Mathew Ingram here. If you're getting this email, then you signed up at some point for my newsletter, When The Going Gets Weird (in case you're wondering, that name is a reference to a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, in which he said "
From Washington Post: "The ball blazed five feet over the goal’s crossbar. Even the team’s security guard couldn’t hide his frustration, kicking the dirt, wondering aloud why Capiatá’s fate had been put in Marset’s hands. Over the next two years, the reasons would become
From Wired: "The first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting
From Now I Know: "After the Manhattan Project came to a close, nuclear weapons testing continued for decades. In 1957, the government detonated 29 bombs in the Nevada desert as part of Operation Plumbbob, hoping to develop better weapons. The researchers dug a 500 foot deep hole, dropped the
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Born in 1874 in Albany, N.Y., Charles Fort started his career as a journalist and aspiring fiction writer until his uncle’s death in 1906 left him with enough money to pursue his paranormal research full time. By then he had already
From The Guardian: "Millions of Britons were forced to drink subpar cups of tea last November due to the record-breaking low pressure caused by Storm Ciarán. The low pressure caused the boiling point of water to drop below the 100C temperature some experts recommend to extract the full flavour
From the Washington Post: “Anna Kohler was running late as she darted toward the L train that was about to leave a New York subway station for her neighborhood in Brooklyn. Like many subway commuters, Kohler, 29, hoped for an uneventful trip to the Morgan Avenue station where she was
From the CBC: "It's a call Carolyn Abraham won't soon forget. In the spring of 1999, while working as the senior medical reporter for the Globe and Mail, Abraham received a tip from McMaster University — the office of Sandra Witelson, to be exact, a professor
From The Free Press: "This is a story that ends with my own assisted death in Switzerland." That is how the suicide note began. Allan Kassenoff was standing in the driveway of his Westchester home on Saturday, May 27, 2023, when he read it. His wife, Catherine, had
From Texas Monthly: "Erik Maund had always lived the high life, as you might expect of a man whose surname had been blasted on TV ads for decades. By the time he was in his forties, he was an executive at Maund Automotive Group, a car sales business whose
From NPR: "The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science.
From New York magazine: "Vlad Artamonov told prospective investors, many of them his former classmates from Harvard Business School, that he’d discovered a hidden way to learn which stocks Warren Buffett was buying early, an edge that would make him a lot of money. It involved, he said,