Present at the Creation
A source present at the creation of ISIS provides insight into how it came into being and its ongoing operations.
Camp Code
A guide to the geography, politics and daily life of Bourj Al Shamali, a refugee camp in Lebanon that has been in existence since 1948.
Death in the Forest
Looking at mushroom foraging around the world, and the extraordinary lengths people go to secure valuable or rare varieties.
What is Code?
This article is 38,000 words long and is all about code. It’s a year old. It’s also a masterpiece.
He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now HeÕs Worried About An Information Apocalypse.
A piece about warnings of an impending ÒinfocalypseÓ, as tools to falsify video footage, images and the writing of real people become ever more sophisticated, and our ability to control their proliferation remains essentially non-existent.
The Oil Cross: On Being Raised to Wage Spiritual Warfare
Life growing up in a family fighting demons on a daily basis.
Person of Interest 2016 Longlist
A delightfully caustic rundown of (in)famous people that have had a big impact this year – it manages to avoid some of the obvious choices and links to further reading on each entrant.
The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems
The author revisits the lost world of Bulletin Board Systems, and finds himself “strolling through a community frozen in time, Pompeii-style.” He finds discussions perfectly preserved, and in some cases maintained, since their heyday as an intimate precursor to the internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Wetsuitman
Two bodies – one found in Norway, the other in the Netherlands, and both wearing Tribord wetsuits. The police were unable to identify them. This article, from Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet, tells their story. The translation is ever so slightly clunky in places, but this is a truly gripping and eye-opening view of how a global crisis affects people on an individual level.