Herald: Recent Episodes
Cody Cassidy
1,324 words
Let’s say for a moment you want to camp alongside the dinosaurs. But not just any dinosaurs. You want to camp alongside the most famous. The most fearsome. So let’s say you spin the dials on a time machine to 66.5 million years ago and you travel back to the late Cretaceous period.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-survive-a-killer-asteroid/
1,864 words
Just after sunrise on the morning of August 9, 2012, in the Houston suburb of Katy, Scott Catt, a fifty-year-old structural engineer, was awakened by the buzzing of his alarm clock in the master bedroom of the apartment he shared with his twenty-year-old son, Hayden, and his eighteen-year-old daught
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/i-would-only-rob-banks-for-my-family/
1,546 words
When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot.
http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2012/july/the-most-amazing-bowling-story-ever-bill-fong/
2,147 words
After 14 summers excavating in Yellowstone National Park, Doug MacDonald has a simple rule of thumb. “Pretty much anywhere you’d want to pitch a tent, there are artifacts,” he says, holding up a 3,000-year-old obsidian projectile point that his team has just dug out of the ground.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lost-history-yellowstone-180976518/
1,983 words
At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1983, a man the FBI called the Yankee Bandit walked into the lobby of a Bank of America in the Melrose district of Los Angeles and stood in line.
https://crimereads.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-bank-robbery-capital-of-the-world/
31,457 words
There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year
2,531 words
Around the nursing home where she lives, in Phoenix, Dorinda Lopez, seventy-one, mostly keeps to herself. People can tell she’s from somewhere else, on account of her southern accent. When she gets angry, as she sometimes does when she talks about the past, it gets thick.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34773551/prison-break-lovebirds/
9,091 words
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/the-great-hunt-for-forrest-fenns-hidden-treasure.html
2,661 words
A New Jersey family bought their ideal home. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/the-haunting-of-657-boulevard-in-westfield-new-jersey.html
1,504 words
Of course he had impressed Lucille Ball. In the late seventies, the actress, a regular on the game-show circuit, had been a fan of the flashy daytime competition “High Rollers”—in large part because of its dignified host, a young mustachioed Canadian named Alex Trebek.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-rare-authority-of-alex-trebek
3,726 words
Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop.
https://longreads.com/2019/02/12/the-caviar-con/
1,480 words
A voice for working-class women and an icon for all kinds of women, Parton has maintained her star power throughout life phases and political cycles.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-united-states-of-dolly-parton
1,289 words
A faraway island in Alaska has had its share of visitors, but none can remain for long on its shores.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-island-humans-cant-conquer/
8,560 words
The kids’ television program, helmed by a crop of Texan theatrical talents, landed on PBS 25 years ago.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/wishbone-oral-history/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
599 words
Herald turns articles into audio, and reading into listening.
https://mattdickenson.com/2020/09/21/herald-speaks-to-you/
1,014 words
If you had been in Pompeii in 79 AD, you might have tried to hunker down or escape by sea. This would be a mistake. But there is a way to safety.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-escape-from-erupting-volcano/
4,064 words
Precious maps, books and artworks vanished from the Pittsburgh archive, and the caper’s final chapter was just written
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/theft-carnegie-library-books-maps-artworks-180975506/
6,247 words
In the summer of 2014 an unusual bank robber shocked, mystified and captivated the US. The Bombshell Bandit tells Jeff Maysh her story.
http://bbc.com/news/magazine-32481834
1,741 words
Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness to create something alluring.
https://longreads.com/2018/09/10/ugly-history-of-beautiful-things-perfume/
5,953 words
Theodore Robert Wright III carried out one of the boldest insurance fraud schemes Texas has ever seen. That was only the half of it.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/it-was-never-enough/
4,644 words
Robert Ivan Nichols simply disappeared from his average, 1960s Midwestern life — until, using DNA, sleuths uncovered the truth. But were they digging where they shouldn’t have been?
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/21361536/dna-true-crime-robert-ivan-nichols-zodiac-killer
13,045 words
This is the inside tale of Michael Jordan's deep family history, back to Wilmington, North Carolina, down a tiny stretch of rural Highway 117, where five generations of Jordans came before him.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29180890/michael-jordan-history-flight
3,896 words
The grocer started communicating with its Chinese counterparts in January and was running tabletop simulations a few weeks later. (But nothing prepared it for the rush on toilet paper.)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/
860 words
Growing crowds have turned the world’s tallest mountain into a valuable commercial asset. But where’s all the money going?
https://thehustle.co/how-mount-everest-became-a-multimillion-dollar-business/