USA

How to Fix Facebook – Before It Fixes Us

This piece has been doing the rounds in technology circles because of the unique profile of its author – a Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. Having observed Facebook’s impact on US Elections and the UK EU Referendum, he issues a clarion call for reform.

The Showman

A May 2016 profile of Preet Bharara, the charismatic United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who announced yesterday that he had been fired by the Trump administration after refusing to stand down.

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

A message board allowing users to post anonymously has played a significant role in the recent history of internet culture (think – the birthplace of the meme), the development of new extreme right movements sometimes called the ‘alt-right’, and the series of events that put Trump in the White House.

How Rudy Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown

Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Rudy Giuliani is full of political insight, but also contains a healthy dose of revealing anecdotes – such as those about life at Giuliani’s favourite cigar club, complete with Alec Baldwin’s description of “Republican Manhattan”.

Don’t Eat Before Reading This

The 1999 piece that helped launch Anthony Bourdain’s career as a writer and broadcaster. In it, he offered readers the inside track on the restaurant industry, warts and all. It was apparently sent in to the magazine as an unsolicited manuscript.

The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People

A look at one of the toughest jobs in the business – content moderation at Facebook. It is area where the company has been forced to ramp up their team due to a string of crises and bad publicity. The piece does well at providing a sense of the scale, difficulty and sheer oddness of the task – which, for example, now involves the company having a specific policy on things like what variety of photos of anuses photoshopped onto celebrities should be acceptable.