I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From a 1984 Rolling Stone article about the death of Jerry Lee Lewis's fourth wife, Shawn: "The killer was in his bedroom, behind the door of iron bars, as Sonny Daniels, the first ambulance man, moved down the long hall to the guest bedroom to check the
When he made his 1973 classic horror film, The Exorcist, director William Friedkin had never actually seen one performed. For decades he wondered how close he had come to reality. So in May of 2016, Friedkin watched as Father Gabriele Amorth, known as "the Dean of Exorcists,” tried to
Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behaviour. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive "feelings." The team of researchers set
A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found. The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City
Previously known as South West Africa, Namibia gained independence from South Africa after many years of guerilla warfare in the Border War. About the time Namibia was founded, Berrie Holtzhausen began a remarkable journey from irreverent preacher to caregiver for people with dementia and finally to his latest role: locating
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), a condition that’s often postviral and similar to what some long Covid sufferers appear to have, can be so debilitating that it leaves those who have it with a sense of desperation. That wasn’t apparent during a recent demonstration, says
One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you. Some customers snap up entire rolls, three hundred dollars’ worth of tickets, and
Peter Schjeldahl, a poet who was also the longtime art critic for the New Yorker, died recently at the age of 80. He wrote a piece called "The Art of Dying" in 2019, after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. "Why me? Why not me?," he
In the mid-1800s, travelers moving up and down the Hudson River would have been witness to an abnormal sight: Mayan ruins and artifacts a thousand miles north of where they should be. Some of the settlers in that area seem to have felt something of an inferiority complex toward
Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy
One June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. He hurried into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Aluminum metalized polyethylene