Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart
This extraordinary piece, spanning the Iraq War right up to the present day, takes up an entire issue of New York Times magazine and is the result of 18 months of reporting.
The Cave Divers Who Went Back For Their Friends
The tragic story of what went wrong for a group of Finnish deep water cave divers when they were over a hundred meters underground.
Scaling the World’s Most Lethal Mountain, in the Dead of Winter
A profile of a group of Polish climbers planning to summit the deadly giant K2 in winter, following in the footsteps of a celebrated older generation.
Meet the Companies Literally Dropping ‘Irish’ Pubs in Cities Across the World
How to manufacture and export a prefab “McPub”.
“Oh My God, This Is So F***ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side
A piece examining the sex party culture in Silicon Valley.
The angry sea will kill us all
A piece looking at the destruction wrought by climate change on the Pacific Islands of Kiribati (on average 2-3 metres above sea level), already vulnerable due to unscrupulous phosphate mining stretching back a century. http://bit.ly/stuff-sea
Tales from the new Silk Road
Stories from different players involved in a vast Chinese infrastructure project aimed at expanding trade routes – a “bid to shape our century”.
Playing By Pyongyang’s Rules
The challenges of running a travel agency when your top destination is North Korea.
The 21st Century Gold Rush
An interactive piece including some evocative photography and data visualisation, this article looks at those making big money from the refugee crisis, focusing in turn on Niger, Italy, Turkey and Germany.
I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe
The author of this piece played one of the world’s most popular and talked about video games (cf Premier League footballers mimicking its virtual dances in their real-world celebrations) and thinks he has discovered something about the way humans work.