I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Long before Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published in 1818, an author penned a story that resembles it on more than one account: François‐Félix Nogaret, Le Miroir des événemens actuals, ou la belle au plus offrant (The Looking Glass of Actuality, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder, 1790)
Before he found himself on the Al-Shahaniya racetrack on the outskirts of Doha, Esan Maruff had never seen a camel race. It was May 2005, and Maruff’s robotics team was on-site for a Qatar-funded research project — to make human jockeys obsolete by building a camel-racing robot. Looking back, he
With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation, and the notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Baden-Powell revealed how he and
As the Cold War simmered between the US and the Soviet Union, both nations proposed some pretty outlandish ideas, but one of the most mind-boggling was the once-classified plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. After the USSR made cosmic history by sending the world’s first artificial
It was the morning of November 1, 1918, and the end of his reign was nigh – that much was clear to Austria’s final emperor. He turned to a loyal servant, Lord High Steward Leopold Count Berchtold and put him in charge of a sensitive mission: to secret the Habsburg
The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone pillar. The man had wrapped his chisel in cloth to quiet his hammer strikes. Whenever there was some unexpected sound, he froze. The man working there
During his student days, Sam started to experiment with the idea of an artistic alter ego – a character to accompany his work. He turned up to give a third-year presentation in a fully doodled suit, replete with doodled accessories (fedora, briefcase), announcing he was The Doodle Man from Doodle Land.
A computer game-style drone attack system has gone viral among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister has told the Guardian. Drone teams competing for points under the Army of Drones Bonus System killed or wounded 18,
MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done.
A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden,
The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living
James Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier. Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the