I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Just before noon on Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima. The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, and the teenager watched a bolt of lightning strike
It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear. Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the
In June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She talked nervously about being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art, then greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, and talked about her Ojibwe grandfather. The following year, the Emily
If you're a hard-core nerd, you probably already know this, but for those who don't, it's a fascinating story: In 1941, Hedy Lamarr, a famous silent-film star, patented the spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping technology that became the underpinnings of cellular telecommunications and
Egyptian mummies, long an object of modern fascination, seem to link us with the ancient past by preserving distinct human form. But this was not the true reason for the intricate process, according to a new British exhibition. The technique was instead a way of transforming dead dignitaries into a
I usually link to print articles here, but I'm making an exception for this short documentary, which was produced by Madonna and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's from 2019, but I only just came across it. It's about a man from Malawi
The Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a popular natural history museum in the Netherlands, owns about 40,000 prehistoric objects collected in the 19th century by the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois from the banks of the Bengawan Solo, a river in Java, and at other digs in Indonesia. The highlight is a
he human body and brain undergo a series of profound changes over the course of dying. Some of these, like elevated anxiety and agitation, can be difficult for the patient, family members, and caregivers. In the most extreme cases, the only recourse is palliative sedation, which is essentially putting a
Please don’t lick the toads. The U.S. National Park Service made the plea last week to help protect the Sonoran desert toad, which secretes a toxin unlike any other found on the planet. The effects of the toxin depend on your perspective. Some call it a dangerous poison
Alex Hurst writes for The Guardian: "I kept the news in all the way out of the terminal until halfway through the airport parking garage, which was as far as I could hold it. It was the kind of announcement that was too voluminous for the inside of a
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