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.
Promethea Unbound
A fine piece looking at the difficulties experienced by a child genius, including a financial benefactor trying to kill her mother.
Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the world’s most important number
A look deep inside the Libor scandal that reads like a Hollywood clich of corporate malfeasance.
MIA
The remarkable reappearance in Vietnam in 2008 of an American commando whose helicopter went down in Laos half a century before was not all that it seemed.
Welcome to the automated warehouse of the future
A look at the Ocado warehouse in Andover, UK, where automation has been implemented sufficiently effectively to allow the company to sell their solution to other organisations.
How Canada’s Health Care System Helped Create a Killer
A piece looking at failures in treatment that led to a tragic outcome when an innocent person was murdered in Ontario by a young man with a well-documented history of mental health issues. The author interviews key people involved to try to understand what happened and how it came to pass.