2017

“No one will be safe until many, many more have died.” In a dispatch from Manila, James Fenton describes the current war on drugs in the Philippines and two types of killings: “buy-bust” operations and EJKs, or extrajudicial killings.

Michael Idov, who’d returned to his native Russia for work a few years ago, recalls the culture of cynicism and sense of hopeless defeat under a deceitful, immovable “hybrid regime…an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy.” He suggests Americans take note, as we may be headed in that direction ourselves.

Michele Kirsch on working as a cleaner in London, England, and the fascinating, unspoken social rules that keep a cleaner-cleanee relationship “shipshape and Bristol-fashion.”

The strange story of Mohamed Salmène Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who killed 86 people — ages 2 to 92 — with a 21 ton truck on Bastille Day, 2016, framing seemingly unwitting accomplices “in a crime without discernible meaning.”