Making China Great Again
A piece suggesting that China is stepping into the vacuum created by America’s lack of international leadership.
In a Devastated Country, One City Is Thriving
Marib, a regional city in war-ravaged Yemen, lies “poised between horror and hope.”
The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures
A piece that analyses Austen’s writing to try to understand her success in the “Darwinian struggle for literary immortality”.
Why We’re Post-Fact
A piece explaining how we came to find ourselves in an era where our political leaders are freed from fact, allowing us all to “indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence”.
Trained to Kill: How Four Boy Soldiers Survived Boko Haram
A moving and troubling piece recounting the experience of four boys abducted by a religious militia in Nigeria and forced to join their army. http://www.bit.ly//nyt-boko
The Living Disappeared
An account of the babies born in torture centres during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and the search to find them, led by a group of grandmothers.
An Island Presence
An arresting excerpt from Howard Cunnell’s memoir Fathers & Sons, exploring what it is to grow up, to have a family, to be a parent, and through this to examine what he terms (in a phrase borrowed from a poem by another writer) “the shaping axe” of love. A fine piece of writing.
The Baby in the Plastic Bag
A man is walking by a graveyard in Oslo and hears a wail. It is a newborn baby, abandoned with only a plastic bag for protection, and close to death. This is the remarkable story of what happened next.
Dispatches from the Rap Wars
A sociologist spent 18 months living with gangs in Chicago fighting bitterly violent local turf wars, and simultaneously trying to make it big with rap tracks and on social media.