The Last of the Iron Lungs
A profile of three of the last polio sufferers in the US using an iron lung. The piece examines what life is like spent in one of these contraptions, used in a medical context for nearly 100 years.
UK General Election Special
Our election special provides a range of pieces from different publications on the coming week’s UK election – offering information, analysis and opinion from different viewpoints. We’ll keep adding noteworthy pieces that are published in the coming days.
Dispatches from the Rap Wars
A sociologist spent 18 months living with gangs in Chicago fighting bitterly violent local turf wars, and simultaneously trying to make it big with rap tracks and on social media.
The Third Person
A story looking at the professionals hired by wives in China to deal with their husbands’ mistresses.
The Clam That Sank a Thousand Ships
The remarkable story of the shipworm, a wood eating mollusk that has plagued mariners for hundreds of years, and has had a resurgence due to a variety of factors including the large quantities of debris washed out to sea by the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
The dizzying story of Symphony of the Seas, the largest and most ambitious cruise ship ever built
A story looking at the sheer complexity and scale involved in designing the floating cities that make up modern cruise ships. http://bit.ly/wired-cruise
Returning to Second Life
A piece revisiting the alternative virtual world Second Life, which is still surviving and even generating significant revenues, despite receding from popular consciousness in the last decade.
Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole
The story of Nasa’s evocatively named Operation IceBridge.
The Lost Joys of the Screen Saver
This piece, an artistic appreciation of computer screen savers, doesn’t hesitate to use three long words where one short one would suffice, and cites sources from Borges to Escher. Alongside that it retains an infectious enthusiasm for these artefacts of an earlier age of the web.