China is securing sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources at a staggering rate. With the buying spree comes contracts, workers, and of course, politics. (Part 1 of a 6 part series, rest here)

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

Exploring the relationship between cats and the Internet in Japan.

How governments and private companies have engaged in digital arms trading by building a global black market for ‘zero day’ hacks.

The CIA’s declassified account of the two decades two young officers spent as captives after being shot down over China during the Korean War.

Inside China’s vast new experiment in social ranking.

Forty-five days of avoiding the coronavirus.

The paper reports on a battle of its own.

The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass "tough-on-crime" legislation — combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws — has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties. The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two decades have converged and reached extremes.

While political leaders trade threats, the pandemic has made Americans even more reliant on China’s manufacturers.

How an autocratic CEO made the company billions, alienating almost everyone else in the process.

How a touring dance company battles the Chinese Communist Party.

As labels big and small attempt to gain traction in the world’s largest market, they’re learning that selling pop is never simple in the epicenter of piracy.

Fentanyl is quickly becoming America’s deadliest drug. But law enforcement couldn’t trace it to its source—until one teenager overdosed in North Dakota.

“None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.”

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”

Sean Quinn was once a billionaire folk hero, but then things turned very dark in the borderlands.

Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

Sexual harassment. Hate speech. Employee walkouts. The Silicon Valley giant is trapped in a war against itself. And there’s no end in sight.

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

Thirty-four years after the Bhopal gas leak, the abandoned waste pits are spreading poison and still destroying lives.

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.