Fan Bingbing is one of the most recognisable faces in China’s movie industry. So it sent huge ripples through the entertainment world when, for a part of 2018, she disappeared. The story highlights the tightrope on which many of China’s new elite walk – “You play ball, or you are screwed. So you play ball.”
A look at the story, and writing, behind historic white nationalist movements in the USA. The piece concludes with the following reflection – “When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.”
An analysis of the Gilets Jaunes movement that has rocked Emmanuel Macron’s administration.
A look at the incredibly challenging work done by moderators at Facebook and their outsourcing partners, reportedly in far from ideal conditions.
Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, on a strand of migration to the US linked directly to the effects of the Honduran drugs trade.
A fine piece of reporting, peeling back the layers of Russian power and criminality swirling around the murder of the Russian politician and fixer Denis Voronenkov.
A study of the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, and the theory she has “elaborated across decades”. The theory, in its essence, is that “equality is the basis for a free society”.
The complicated business of Beirut’s independent electricity grid.
The story of Song Yang, a woman working in one of Queens’ notorious massage parlours, but brought up in Liaoning, China. The story starts with her death, but it goes on to explore how she came to that moment, and the brutal environment in which she found herself, in a finely nuanced portrait.
The important, powerful story of Amber Wyatt, a woman who in 2006 reported that she had been raped at a high school party, and the many ways in which she was subsequently let down by her community.