Burj Khalifa: Alone at the Top of the World
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.
Why We’re Post-Fact
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”.
The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People
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.
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.