Want to build a far-right movement? Spain’s Vox party shows how.
A look at the slickly crafted messaging and rapid rise of Spain’s far-right party Vox.
How an Augmented Reality Game Escalated into Real-World Spy Warfare
Ingress is an augmented reality game set in a world with two competing factions – The Enlightened and The Resistance. It involves people in the real world undertaking extraordinary acts of organisation and skill to wage a global war of daring missions, espionage and subterfuge.
Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect
This story posits the theory that Viktor Orbán’s assault on Central European University is part of a wider strategy of “liquidating the intelligentsia, draining the public of education, and molding a more pliant nation.”
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch
The second instalment in the extraordinary life of Josephine Bonaparte that takes her from marriage to Napoleon to Empress of France.
Anything That Flies, On Anything That Moves
A visualisation with accompanying narrative that examines the data behind the two million bombing missions the US undertook on Southeast Asian countries in the 1960s and 70s.
The real story behind Harper Lee’s lost true crime book
The story behind Harper Lee’s unpublished project The Reverend, a true crime book about a serial killer from Alabama. The piece outlines Lee’s keen urge to get to the truth of matters, and separate that truth from opinion. This was a concern that amongst other things led her to lament Truman Capote’s approach in a letter to The New Yorker’s fact-checker – “Truman’s having long ago put fact out of business had made me despair of ‘factual’ accounts of anything.”
Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two
A look at how EU funding is distributed to help less economically developed regions catch up with their more economically developed counterparts. Some countries are redrawing their internal boundaries in order to gain better access to this funding for less developed areas adjacent to their richer capitals. It’s an insightful piece with superior quality data visualisation deployed to tell the story of economic development in Europe.
Inside Gang Territory in Honduras: ‘Either They Kill Us or We Kill Them.’
A sobering look at the challenges facing the Casa Blanca group of ex-gang members trying to keep their neighbourhood in San Pedro Sula, Honduras free of gangs.
On Particle Physics
A clear, concise primer on particle physics, concerning itself with both its theory and practical applications and deploying interactive tools and examples throughout to help illuminate the topic. The author eloquently makes the case for his discipline in his conclusion – “Particle physics helps us unveil the mysteries of the universe, and has let us discern the basic components of matter and the basic forces which govern the universe as we know it so far.”
The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program
A look back at the time when Amazon launched a transformative product, Prime. It’s a time that seems hard to imagine now, when Amazon was not an all-conquering behemoth and “there wasn’t a blind faith that every Jeff idea was going to be a home run”.