A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
A piece examining a project driven by hope – an in-depth study of the health of North Korean defectors that seeks to understand the long-term impact of living through the regime’s many hardships, with the goal of rendering a future reunification more straightforward.
A piece looking at the thieves illegally salvaging sunken battleships.
A message board allowing users to post anonymously has played a significant role in the recent history of internet culture (think – the birthplace of the meme), the development of new extreme right movements sometimes called the ‘alt-right’, and the series of events that put Trump in the White House.
Keith Davies disappeared at sea in 2015. He had the little known job of fisheries observer, inspectors who travel with commercial fishing vessels to ensure fishing regulations are being observed. The role is often very isolated, sometimes coming into conflict with the ship’s crew – out at sea, it can even be dangerous.
A piece looking at the story of the film The Thief and the Cobbler, the unfinished magnum opus of Richard Williams, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living animator.
A piece looking at how murder and domestic violence is reported in the press, recounting a terrible recent case in County Cavan, Ireland.
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.