The Daimons’ Wisdom
A biographer of Machiavelli looks to Florentine history for lessons in the battle to preserve the rule of law in the face of tyranny.
The Reckoning
A piece revisiting a celebrated series of documentaries about the Ganiga tribe in Papua New Guinea and their fractured interactions with Australian prospectors. The author looks at how the story has progressed in the thirty years since The New York Times said of the first instalment_Ñ_Òwatching it feels like taking an inspired crash course in economics and cultural anthropology.
The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump
New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s piece on Donald Trump starts with a reference to the infamous Roman Emperor Nero and goes from there.
Kim Jong-un’s North Korea: Life inside the totalitarian state
Months of interviews with over 25 escapees from North Korea reveal that life under the “Great Successor” is every bit as grim as under his predecessors.
Eat, pray, live: the Lagos megachurches building their very own cities
They started as accommodation to support huge events, but have expanded to become highly desirable living quarters for the Lagos faithful.
Ur-Fascism
This renowned Umberto Eco piece, written in 1995 in an attempt to define and identify the common elements of diverse fascist movements, has been given a renewed lease of life in today’s political landscape.
The Virus Hunters
A look at the challenges facing the teams based in the Democratic Republic of Congo searching for the next dangerous viruses. They are doing their work at a time when large scale outbreaks are ever more likely as humans encroach further into animal habitats.
Dmitry Medvedev: the whipping boy for Russia’s discontented
A profile of Vladimir Putin’s political foil.