The Facebooks of China
How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.
How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.
April Rabkin Fast Company Feb 2011 Permalink
How the relationship between favela-based drug gangs and elite police units tasked with fighting them came to define Rio de Janeiro.
On gay life in Saudi Arabia.
Nadya Labi The Atlantic May 2007 25min Permalink
Mattathias Rath made a fortune selling cure-all vitamins in Europe before moving his business to South Africa, where he launched a massive campaign against retroviral AIDS medications and in favor of his own vitamin cocktails. When scientists, AIDS non-profits, and even Medecins San Frontieres objected, he sued.
Ben Goldacre Bad Science Apr 2009 20min Permalink
On the utter brutality of life in the tent cities, one year after the earthquake.
Mac McClelland Mother Jones Jan 2011 25min Permalink
Last year, an Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to assassinate a Hamas leader. They completed their mission, but were later humiliated when a twenty-seven minute video of their movements was posted online. How their cover got blown.
Ronen Bergman GQ Jan 2011 25min Permalink
Memories of the expat revolutionary scene in 1980s Nicaragua. An excerpt from Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War.
Deb Olin Unferth The Believer Jan 2011 10min Permalink
“In 2000, Zimbabwe’s dictator began kicking white farmers off their land. One man decided to stay.”
Andrew Corsello GQ Jul 2006 40min Permalink
Colombian traffickers have a new smuggling method of choice: specially designed submarines capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine and covering 2,000 miles without refueling.
Frank Owen Maxim Apr 2009 15min Permalink
The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.
Eliot Weinberger London Review of Books Jun 2005 15min Permalink
Anatomy of an international incident; how three idealistic young American hikers wandered across the Kurdistan-Iran border and ended up in Iranian prison charged with spying.
Joshua Hammer Outside May 2010 20min Permalink
Putin, Medvedev, and how the Russian security agency FSB became the “new nobility.”
Amy Knight New York Review of Books Jan 2011 Permalink
“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”
Luc Sante New York Review of Books Dec 2010 Permalink
At tourism’s wildest frontier; guided tours of Afghanistan.
Damon Tabor Outside Dec 2010 25min Permalink
The history of a Japanese archipelago and its inhabitants, through rebellions and famine, a 20th century exodus for prostitution work across Asia, and finally depopulation and isolation.
Richard Hendy Spike Japan Nov 2010 25min Permalink
A Stockholm prostitute is found hacked apart in a dumpster, her head is never found. Two accomplished doctors, confirmed creeps, are arrested. Uncertainty endures.
Julie Bindel The Telegraph Nov 2010 10min Permalink
The team of assistants that made Gandhi.
Ian Desai Wilson Quarterly Sep 2010 30min Permalink
Published on the eve of Iran’s 2009 presidential election and subsequent protests, a look at the booze-fueled, hijab-less underground party scene in the capital.
An oral history of a family in Mexico City, in transition from poverty to the lower-middle class, as they scramble to organize the burial of a slum-dwelling aunt.
Oscar Lewis New York Review of Books Sep 1969 40min Permalink
An investigation into Lashkar-i-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 Mumbai massacre, and why Pakistani authorities has not arrested their leaders.
Sebastian Rotella ProPublica Nov 2010 15min Permalink
Scenes from the new Tijuana: two teenage brothers from the country club set descend into the cartel underworld, bored federales guard the acid pit where hundreds of bodies were erased, families picnic through a chain-link border fence.
Ed Vulliamy Guernica Nov 2010 30min Permalink
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, oil magnate and once the richest man in Russia, delivers a speech from prison, where he has lived since 2003.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky The New Republic Nov 2010 10min Permalink
The macabre, ultra-violent plays put on at the Grand Guignol defined an era in Paris, attracting foreign tourists, aristocrats, and celebrities. Goering and Patton saw plays there in the same year. But the carnage of WWII ultimately undermined the shock of Guignol’s brutality, and audiences disappeared.
P.E. Schneider New York Times Magazine Mar 1957 10min Permalink
Russia has ended its death penalty, leaving in its place five prison “colonies” to house its most hardened criminals, nicknamed “The White Swan”, “The Black Dolphin”, “The Vologda Coin”, “The Village of Harps”. Inside “The Black Eagle.”
Ekaterina Loushnikova Open Democracy Oct 2010 20min Permalink
On China’s modern-day Communist Party and why foundational myths can never be shed.
Slavoj Žižek London Review of Books Oct 2010 10min Permalink