I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
From The Guardian: "When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years
From Engelsberg Ideas: "The first winter was the bloodiest. Some estimates suggest that Rosa Zemlyachka’s crew shot as many as 96,000 people in the space of four months (a tenth of the total population). Though Bela Kun’s attempt at revolution in Hungary had collapsed, he remained
From the Las Vegas Review Journal: "Groucho Marx called Alice Cooper ‘Coop,’ the way he used to do with actor Gary Cooper. He and the rock star met while dueting on 'Lidia the Tattooed Lady' at a Frank Sinatra birthday party. They became friends while living in
From Hacker News: "Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at an event in London how cybercriminals hacked an unnamed casino through its Internet-connected thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby of the casino. According to what Eagan claimed, the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the
From The Assembly: "Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone
From Slate: "29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to
From Nautilus: "Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of
From Nautilus: "In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the
From Global News: "A Prince George, B.C., man received a 90-day driving prohibition after he was spotted by police driving an unusual vehicle on a street on Friday morning. On Sept. 5, an officer was on patrol in the area of 15th Avenue and Nicholson Street at 9
From History Workshop: "Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical
From Wikipedia: "Hyraceum is the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of both urine and feces of the rock hyrax and closely related species. The rock hyrax defecates in the same location over generations, which may be sheltered in caves. These locations form middens that are composed of hyraceum and
From Boing Boing: "For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia (a neurological condition that limits muscle movements and motor skills), was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled. He was diagnosed with autism at age 2. It wasn't