My Life With Face Blindness
On life with prosopagnosia, a condition that impairs sufferers’ abilities to recognise familiar faces.
My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?
An intimate portrait of a popular local restaurant shutting down due to covid-19, written by its owner. The piece looks beyond the end of this crisis, to what purpose a restaurant will have in our cities in the future.
The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People
A look at the extraordinary prevalence of big cat breeding and ownership in the United States, an industry filled with strange stories and unscrupulous characters (warning: for those watching the Netflix documentary Tiger King, spoilers abound).
The Pint-Size Nation off the English Coast
The story of Sealand, a World War II sea defence tower just off the cost of England in the North Sea, ‘conquered’ by a former Army Major on behalf of his wife in 1966.
Every Inch of Earth
The author writes about his friend and collaborator, with whom he founded a photo agency in Iraq, before he was taken by ISIS.
Everything on ‘Naked and Afraid’ Is Real—and I Lived It
The author writes about her extraordinary experience on the long-running Discovery Channel show Naked and Afraid, where two strangers have to survive in the wilderness together with nothing but a handful of tools.
The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind
A great story about a master player in the “murky intersection of spycraft, politics, and war” during the Cold War, and whether his biggest operation was a “monkey wrench or a major event?”
Survivor’s Guilt in the Mountains
A man seeking to help elite mountaineers deal with a sadly common occurrence in their line of work – the death of their friends and collaborators.
Was Jeanne Calment the Oldest Person Who Ever Lived—or a Fraud?
Jeanne Calment was 122 years of age when she died in France in 1997, and the oldest person in the world. It was only some years after her death that people started to question whether 1875 was in fact the year of her birth, and suggesting that the woman who claimed to be Jeanne Calment was in fact her daughter Yvonne. This is a fascinating story of gerontology (including such alarming nuggets as the the Gompertz law which states that “the mortality rate for adult humans roughly doubles with every additional eight years of age”) and social history.