Four Months Undercover As a Private Prison Guard
A journalist spent four months undercover as a guard at a prison in Louisiana. He recorded the experience in this shocking article, accompanied by secretly recorded video footage of prison life.
Where Slang Comes From
An absorbing data visualisation and analysis of how popular slang words of the last few years spark into life, come into fashion, and fade away.
The murder that shook Iceland
The murder of a young woman caused huge upset in a country where entire years sometimes pass without any taking place. This story traces the detective’s hunt for the killer, and the response from the community as a whole.
The Lottery Hackers: Jerry and Marge Go Large
The story of a retiree couple that succeeding in cracking the lottery, through a mixture of maths and the hard graft required to buy thousands upon thousands of tickets. It was almost plain sailing – until they ran into some competition.
To Catch a Counterfeiter
A representative from Pinkerton, a long-established American detective agency, takes the author on a tour of one of China’s counterfeiting hotspots.
My déja vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more
The author’s brain tumour has left him experiencing acute and persistent déja vu – here he his uses his personal experience to explore both the phenomenon and memory more broadly.
Burj Khalifa: Alone at the Top of the World
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.
NATO Grapples with Serious Organisational Shortcomings
A piece suggesting that a shortfall in NATO’s military capacity, paired with its excessive bureaucracy, means it is ill-equipped to face “a major conflict with Russia”.
The Uninhabitable Earth
Published this month, The Uninhabitable Earth is apparently the most read article in New York Magazine’s history. The piece proposes that the impact of climate change will be felt far sooner and far more severely that people realise. The piece is of interest in its own right, but has also provoked a strong response in the scientific community, including many climate change scientists who believe it overstates the case in an unhelpful manner.
Second Life was Just the Beginning
Second Life was perhaps the first virtual world to enter mainstream discourse. Its founder thinks new virtual reality technologies are its successor, and destined for mass adoption. http://www.bit.ly/wired-secondlife