A story about Patrick Skinner, currently a local cop in Savannah, Georgia, but formerly a CIA case officer directly engaged in post-9/11 operations. The piece jumps between his two careers and relates how he is applying lessons from the CIA to community policing.
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.
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.