Latest Stories
Most recently published stories on Vocal.
The Man Who Fell From 33,000 Feet and Lived:
How a Serbian flight attendant survived the highest fall without a parachute and the mysterious explosion that caused it The survival of Vesna Vulović, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant who fell 33,330 feet from an exploding aircraft over Czechoslovakia in 1972 and lived, represents the most extreme survivable fall in recorded history, and the circumstances of both the explosion that destroyed JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 and her impossible survival have never been fully explained, making her story one of the most remarkable and mysterious in aviation history. On January 26, 1972, Vulović was working aboard DC-9 Flight 367 traveling from Stockholm to Belgrade with stops in Copenhagen and Zagreb, and she was actually a last-minute crew substitution, replacing another flight attendant named Vesna who had the same first name, and this twist of fate meant that she was on a plane she was never supposed to be on, working a route that was not her usual assignment, when at 4:01 PM the aircraft was at cruising altitude over the mountains of eastern Czechoslovakia and suddenly exploded, breaking apart in mid-air and sending debris and passengers falling six miles to the ground below.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in Men
Trapped Beneath the Rubble
Darlene Etienne's miraculous rescue from Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake and the faith that kept her alive The story of Darlene Etienne's survival for seventeen days beneath the rubble of a collapsed building following the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010, represents one of the most medically improbable survival stories ever documented, challenging everything doctors understand about how long humans can survive without water and food, and her rescue on January 29, long after search and rescue teams had given up hope of finding anyone else alive in the ruins, brought a moment of joy and wonder to a nation that had suffered unimaginable tragedy and loss. The earthquake killed an estimated two hundred and twenty thousand people, displaced over one million, and reduced much of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas to rubble, and in the chaos and devastation of the immediate aftermath, thousands of people were trapped under collapsed buildings, and international search and rescue teams worked frantically in the first days to pull survivors from the wreckage, but after about two weeks the official rescue operations were winding down because conventional wisdom held that no one could survive longer than ten to twelve days without water, and any people still trapped were presumed dead.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in History
Rereading Review: "Martin Chuzzlewit" by Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit is one of Dickens' lesser known novels and I'm not going to lie to you but I originally wrote thousands of words for this review before cutting it down. I first read this book (and disliked it) when I was about 20 years' old and I thought that perhaps coming back to it older would make me appreciate the humour more. Spoiler alert: it didn't. I don't like the snide humour of this book, or the attempts at slapstick comedy in atmospheric writing. But I will say that it is satirical and fun and has some of the best examples of writing that the young Dickens had to offer at the time. It may not be in my top five Dickens novels but that's besides the point. Let's take a look at some of my favourite scenes and characters...
By Annie Kapur25 days ago in Geeks
438 Days Adrift
José Salvador Alvarenga's impossible journey across the Pacific and the madness that nearly consumed him The survival story of José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran fisherman who spent four hundred and thirty-eight days drifting across the Pacific Ocean in a small fishing boat, represents one of the longest survival ordeals at sea ever recorded, and the physical and psychological challenges he endured during those fourteen months alone on the ocean would have killed most people many times over, yet somehow Alvarenga not only survived but remained conscious and functional enough to eventually wash ashore on a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands over six thousand miles from where his ordeal began, having crossed the entire Pacific Ocean in a twenty-four-foot fiberglass skiff with no engine, no communication equipment, and almost no supplies. Alvarenga's nightmare began on November 17, 2012, when he and a young crew member named Ezequiel Córdoba left the coast of Mexico on what was supposed to be a routine thirty-hour shark fishing trip, and they were about fifteen miles offshore when a storm struck with unexpected violence, knocking out the boat's engine and radio and sweeping their GPS and most of their supplies overboard, leaving them adrift in the open ocean with no way to navigate, no way to call for help, and no way to propel the boat back to shore.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in Humans
Kia Ford: The Hammer Girl's English Premiere Production
With Igor, managing Lily White through the treacherous tricky trees issue, Kia Ford pondered the buzz factor surrounding her professional standing stating, ‘only goal difference separates the hammer girl from the safe zone’.
By Marc OBrien25 days ago in Chapters
Alive
The shocking true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and the moral horror that saved sixteen lives The crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 into the Andes Mountains on October 13, 1972, and the subsequent seventy-two-day survival ordeal of the passengers would become one of the most controversial and morally complex survival stories ever recorded, forcing sixteen young men to make the unthinkable decision to consume the flesh of their dead friends and teammates in order to stay alive in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and the psychological and ethical dimensions of their choice continue to provoke debate and reflection more than fifty years after their rescue shocked the world. The flight was carrying forty-five people including nineteen members of the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, along with their friends and family members, traveling to Chile for a tournament, and the passengers were young, healthy, optimistic people with their whole lives ahead of them, many of them students from wealthy families who had never experienced real hardship and who could not have imagined that their routine flight would turn into a nightmare of freezing temperatures, starvation, and impossible moral choices that would haunt them forever.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in Pride
My Starbucks Early Spring 2026 Menu Review
Late winter brought a flood of early spring ingredients to Starbucks' menu: a new chai recipe, coconut foam and syrup, and the return of lavender cold foam for your chai and lattes. The Iced Ube Coconut Macchiato looked particularly intriguing, and since I still had some gift card money left over from Christmas, I decided to review a few drinks and the limited-edition Frog Cake Pop.
By Kaitlin Shanks25 days ago in Feast
127 Hours of Hell
Aron Ralston's unthinkable choice in a Utah canyon and the excruciating self-amputation that saved his life The human survival instinct is powerful enough to make us do things we would consider absolutely impossible under normal circumstances, and nowhere is this more dramatically illustrated than in the true story of Aron Ralston, a twenty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer and experienced outdoorsman who became trapped alone in a remote Utah canyon in April 2003 and made the unthinkable decision to amputate his own right arm using a cheap multi-tool knife in order to free himself from the eight-hundred-pound boulder that had him pinned against a canyon wall, and the fact that he survived this self-performed surgery and managed to rappel down a sixty-five-foot cliff and hike seven miles through the desert before finding help represents one of the most remarkable survival stories in modern history. Ralston's ordeal began on Saturday, April 26, 2003, when he drove alone to Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah for a day of solo canyoneering, a sport he was passionate about that involves hiking, climbing, and rappelling through slot canyons, and he deliberately chose not to tell anyone where he was going because he valued his independence and solitude and never imagined that this decision would nearly cost him his life and would become the detail that made his situation so desperately dangerous.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in Men
Why the 2019 OnePlus 7 Pro Feels Faster Than Most 2026 Mid-Rangers
The OnePlus 7 Pro launched in May 2019 with specifications that were absolutely top-tier for the time including the Snapdragon 855 processor, up to twelve gigabytes of RAM, UFS 3.0 storage, and a ninety-hertz QHD+ display that was among the first high-refresh screens on a mainstream smartphone, and while these specs are no longer flagship-level in 2024, the phone still delivers a user experience that feels noticeably smoother and more responsive than most new mid-range and budget phones costing three hundred to five hundred dollars, and this performance advantage comes not from raw processing power which has admittedly been surpassed by modern chips but from the combination of high-quality components, generous RAM, and software optimization that OnePlus implemented when this was their halo product designed to compete with phones costing twice as much.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in 01
The 2018 Pixel 3 XL Still Destroys Most 2026 Budget Phones: Here's Why
The Google Pixel 3 XL launched in October 2018 with a single twelve-megapixel rear camera at a time when competitors were already embracing dual and triple camera systems, and the tech press questioned whether Google's computational photography approach could compete with the hardware arms race happening across the smartphone industry, but six years later that same single camera produces images that still embarrass many modern budget and mid-range phones costing the same inflation-adjusted price, proving that sensor size and megapixel count matter far less than the software processing happening behind the scenes. I have been using a Pixel 3 XL as my secondary phone since 2023, picking one up used for just eighty dollars, and the experience has been revelatory in demonstrating how much of modern smartphone photography is marketing hype rather than meaningful improvement, because in most real-world shooting scenarios the images I capture with this ancient device are indistinguishable from or occasionally superior to photos from phones costing five hundred to seven hundred dollars new in 2024.
By The Curious Writer25 days ago in 01
