The Biggest Secret
The author relates his experience as a New York Times investigative reporter covering the War on Terror, and outlines the pressure that journalists come under from governments to censor stories and reveal sources.
I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe
The author of this piece played one of the world’s most popular and talked about video games (cf Premier League footballers mimicking its virtual dances in their real-world celebrations) and thinks he has discovered something about the way humans work.
Undercover With a Border Militia
A reporter spends time with the highly armed, highly trained militias roaming the US-Mexico border on their own private missions.
The Fighter
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
Do civilisations collapse?
A piece reassessing common tropes we use to explain how civilisations decline, from Easter Island to the Maya.
It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
A special issue of Wired contains several strong pieces looking at the complex freedom of speech trade-offs required in the new information era. Pieces include – the web infrastructure company Cloudflare being embroiled in a free speech debate when offering services to far-right extremists, Reddit as a case study for civil discourse online, a startup making smartphone-neutralising pouches, six stories of censorship, and a look at a database of extremists called Whack-a-Mole.
IÕm Not Black, IÕm Kanye
Ta-Nehisi Coates on two ÔgodsÕ_Ñ_Michael Jackson and Kanye West, his own fortune Òto come of age in the last days of mysteryÓ before the social feed, fame, and America. As one reader puts it, the writing in this piece is Òbottled lightning.Ó http://bit.ly/atlantic-kanye
How the BBC Women Are Working Toward Equal Pay
An examination of the issues of equal pay and the gender pay gap, leading with efforts by female BBC journalists to attain compensation parity with their male colleagues.
The Lost Children of ‘Runaway Train’
The 1991 music video for the smash hit by Soul Asylum featured images of runaway children. This thoughtful piece follows up on their stories a quarter of a century later.
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook – and the World
A piece examining the series of challenges Facebook has faced as it struggles to manage the intended and unintended consequences of its huge scale and the reach it has into many parts of its users’ lives.