30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact
A powerful account of children abandoned in Romanian institutions in indescribably grim conditions and utterly ignored, and the life that one amongst them has gone on to lead.
Letter to My Son
In Letter to my Son, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of acts of violence against black people: “The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies.”
Since I Met Edward Snowden, I’ve Never Stopped Watching My Back
A journalist writes about the alarming degree of surveillance and suspected hacking he was subject to after working with Edward Snowden on a major story, and the paranoia it engendered.
The System That Actually Worked
The internet has dealt with unprecendented levels of traffic during lockdown, and has largely managed to cope.
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
The author of this piece looking to help readers finding the pandemic hard to comprehend outlined its scope as “everything from the virus itself to the symptoms it causes, from deceptive numbers to swirling misinformation, from our desire for simple narratives to the nature of expertise in a crisis too large for any one person to grasp.”
The 9/11 Era Is Over
Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser makes the case that a profoundly new era of global geo-politics is now upon us, and that the orthodoxies of a world where it was perpetually ‘September 12th’ are not adapted to it.
The Pint-Size Nation off the English Coast
The story of Sealand, a World War II sea defence tower just off the cost of England in the North Sea, ‘conquered’ by a former Army Major on behalf of his wife in 1966.
Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful
A look at the origins, composition and behaviour of the new coronavirus itself, in a piece that results in what its author Ed Yong calls “a rough preliminary portrait of SARS-CoV-2”.
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
A look at the prospect in the US of a presidential election saturated with the “censorship through noise” of a coordinated disinformation campaign.