Urban Evolution
Evidence suggests that evolution can take place much more rapidly than Darwin anticipated – this piece explores the phenomenon by looking at animals living around us in cities.
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.
Eat, pray, live: the Lagos megachurches building their very own cities
They started as accommodation to support huge events, but have expanded to become highly desirable living quarters for the Lagos faithful.
Style Is an Algorithm
A piece examining the somewhat terrifying possibility of entirely algorithmically driven cultural tastes, from fashion to art, music, food, home decor and more. It asks what our response is to the central promise of recommendation algorithms “If you like this, you will get more of it, forever” and the new value exchanges that are their outcome.
Not the end of The World: the return of DubaiÕs ultimate folly
Dubai’s iconic / infamous reclaimed offshore property development went bust during the financial crisis and was left empty for years (apart from a solitary beach club in Lebanon). A few developers stayed the course and are now imagining ever more ambitious architectural smorgasbords to entice the global elite.