Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
Essential reading on those alleged connections between Messrs Trump and Putin and the latter’s world view in a triple byline article co-authored by The New Yorker’s Editor David Remnick.
This Town Has Been Labour Since 1919. It’s About To Switch To The Tories
The writer goes to the traditional Labour stronghold of Newcastle-under-Lyme that polling suggests is now leaning towards the Conservative Party and speaks to constituents to find out why.
My déja vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more
The author’s brain tumour has left him experiencing acute and persistent déja vu – here he his uses his personal experience to explore both the phenomenon and memory more broadly.
See No Evil
Not for the fainthearted, this 1993 piece tells the tale of Charles Albright, a man of great charm and many talents who was an apparently upstanding member of Texan society. He was also a murderer, several times over.
To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands
A look at the identification techniques designed to help prosecutions against paedophiles.
Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble
Talk about the Bitcoin bubble and fortunes made and lost is one thing (cf. the news this week that rapper 50 Cent was paid in Bitcoin for an album, forgot about it, and is now $8m richer), but this insightful piece proposes that the blockchain technology behind it can unlock things of far greater value.
Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous
An ambitious piece looking at observer selection effect – where a data set’s composition or properties are correlated with the very existence of its observer. The first example the piece calls on is an analysis of planes returning from WWII bombing raids with the goal of identifying which areas of the fuselage to reinforce, but it rapidly expands in scope to extinction events for our world, and our universe.
The Bloody Family History of the Guillotine
This piece examines the history of the guillotine and of France’s hereditary role of executioner – both inextricably entwined with the events of the French Revolution.
The Astonishing Tale of the Man Mueller Calls “Person A”
Straight from the pages of a Cold War thriller, this is the story of Konstantin Kilimnik, the long time right-hand man to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign Chairman. Kilimnik is now believed to have been an asset of Russian intelligence for a significant portion of his career as a consultant to a range of figures in international politics and business. Robert Mueller’s enquiry charged him on June 8th with two charges relating to obstruction of justice. For more on his former boss Manafort, see these from previous Journal editions (bit.ly/atlantic-manafort & bit.ly/slate-manafort).
The George Soros philosophy – and its fatal flaw
This story profiles a long time bogeyman of the Trumpian right, the billionaire fund owner and philanthropist George Soros, and assesses the state of his vision for an open society.