The story of a murder at an apartment block marketed as a luxury development when it opened in 1968, but now “like an inverse of Dante’s layers of hell”. The building is disintegrating, but houses a large and diverse population, including an estimated 50 drug dealers. This is a story about the changes in fortune in the Italian economy, urban development, immigration, integration, and failing public infrastructure.
A look at the controversial, lucrative world of dog cloning, a practice that first leapt into the public consciousness via celebrity customers such as Barbra Streisand.
A report on the security challenges and failures leaving Europe vulnerable to attack.
A dispatch from the hermetically sealed world of mega-developments as the author and his friend explore the tallest structure in the world, and reflect on the stratosphere of the super rich.
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”.
A look at one of the toughest jobs in the business – content moderation at Facebook. It is area where the company has been forced to ramp up their team due to a string of crises and bad publicity. The piece does well at providing a sense of the scale, difficulty and sheer oddness of the task – which, for example, now involves the company having a specific policy on things like what variety of photos of anuses photoshopped onto celebrities should be acceptable.
A reporter spends time with the highly armed, highly trained militias roaming the US-Mexico border on their own private missions.
An extraordinary piece of reporting. A young soldier returns from Afghanistan, deeply troubled, and commits a crime under the influence of alcohol. The piece goes deep into his life before and after his military career and his deployment abroad. http://www.bit.ly/nyt-fighter
A piece reassessing common tropes we use to explain how civilisations decline, from Easter Island to the Maya.