A story about political polarisation in Poland and the warning signs for liberal democracy everywhere. The author of the piece, Ann Applebaum, is in a unique position to write the story, with Polish and American nationality, a celebrated career writing about the former Soviet Union, and a husband who was formerly Poland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.
As a deep dive into the policing of Mars colonies, this piece is by definition somewhat speculative, but it is no less interesting for it.
A very 21st century tale, involving oligarchs making, losing and hiding their fortunes, and the murder of an enemy of the Russian state, poisoned by a toxic flower in the heart of London.
An extraordinary piece profiling the scientists in Siberia that are seeking to restore the Ice Age by bioengineering woolly mammoths and other creatures. Their ambition is on an epic scale – to reforge a lost world in order to preserve our present one.
Just as the US seems to be turning away from trying to make contact with extra-terrestrial life, China has built a huge custom radio dish for the very purpose. The author visits the dish, examines China’s long history of astronomy and reviews its current attempts to drive scientific innovation.
The author revisits the lost world of Bulletin Board Systems, and finds himself “strolling through a community frozen in time, Pompeii-style.” He finds discussions perfectly preserved, and in some cases maintained, since their heyday as an intimate precursor to the internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
This piece looks at what a highly successful, disruptive organisation like Buzzfeed can learn from its antecedents as disruptors, who are now part of the establishment it is taking on.
A look at the work of Germany’s Bamf, the agency with the thorny task of deciding which refugees receive permission to remain in their country. They have many techniques at their disposal, some that can establish identity with little doubt, many more that can only offer “Hinweis” – a clue as to the truth of the story they’re being told.
An interview with the author of an unusual history book. It is the history of a great galactic conflict that involved many thousands of people and lasted several years. All the participants were real people, but the world they fought in – New Eden – was not.
A piece looking at a bitter fight amongst geologists, stemming from the assertion made by a Princeton academic that the so-called fifth extinction (the one that got the dinosaurs) “was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions.” The debate is still relevant today, as scientists try to predict future extinction events that risk wiping us out.