Ron Hogan
The Archive
How a rich layabout became an accidental activist who founded the ASPCA
Henry Bergh was born in 1813, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder with a thriving business on the East River. He inherited a substantial fortune the year he turned 30,...
An architect built a landmark home for an heiress — and it tore them apart
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the most prominent architects in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, famed for his iconic steel and leather Barcelona chairs that can...
The secret love nest of Frank Lloyd Wright haunted by fire and unspeakable ax murders
The fire at Taliesin had been deliberately set, and the arsonist had slaughtered his lover and the children with an ax before turning to six workers who were also at...
Rich bootlegger confessed to killing his wife — but got away with it anyway
At 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 6, 1927, a man walked into the central police station in Cincinnati and informed the officer on duty, “I just shot my wife, and I...
How disease, war and a remote Scottish island inspired Orwell's '1984'
Jura is a small island off the coast of Scotland, famous for two things: It’s home to a renowned distillery, and it’s where George Orwell wrote “1984.” Orwell arrived at...
How a dot-com party boy worth $50M lost everything in an instant
On New Year’s Day 2000, NYPD and FDNY squads descended on a building in lower Manhattan, where members of the art world had been partying nonstop in the basement since...
The wacky explanations behind bizarre bird names
This October, a Mandarin duck became one of New York’s biggest celebrities, as locals and tourists flocked to Central Park to spot the brightly colored fowl. One enterprising New Yorker...
Inside the fossil-smuggling operation that stretched from Mongolia to NYC
On May 20, 2012, Heritage Auctions in New York City offered a nearly complete fossil of Tarbosaurus bataar, a dinosaur that lived in central Asia during the Cretaceous period, around...
My mom forced me to get married while my dad was dying
In August 1983, Jeanne McCulloch was 25 and ready to marry her college boyfriend at her family’s Hamptons beachfront estate. Her mother told Jeanne’s father, a lifelong alcoholic, that he had...
Why doomed freighter sailed right into a megastorm
Late in the evening of Sept. 30, 2015, two shipmates stood on the bridge of the SS El Faro, reviewing their captain’s order to stay on course. “We don’t have...
City mice have nearly evolved into a whole new species
White-footed mice were living in Manhattan long before human settlers showed up, back when Times Square was home to a red-maple swamp. Today, they’re found in just a few parks...
This man risked his life to study tornadoes — until one killed him
For centuries, humans were almost completely powerless to predict when and where a tornado might strike. By the late 20th century, researchers were able to probe the outer edges of...
This man is why American dinners don't suck
Maybe you had some mango slices for breakfast this morning. Maybe the salad you ate with lunch had plenty of kale in it or some avocado slices laid across the...
Mass extinctions on Earth are more common than you think
Most of us know about the asteroid that hit Earth just off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, but that’s not...
How Beatrix Potter's sad life led to her brilliant career
For more than a century, characters like Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Samuel Whiskers have brought joy to boys and girls around the world. But these icons of children’s literature...
This is the real way the US military changed the world
Following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, US troops were embedded in areas in which few, if any, of our soldiers spoke the language. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency...
George Washington almost broke the law trying to recapture his freed slave
When George Washington was sworn in as America’s first president in 1789, his wife Martha did not accompany him to the nation’s capital in Manhattan. Instead, she remained at the...