Catherine Cusick

Luke O’Brien profiles Andrew Anglin, a one-time anti-racist vegan who’s grown up to become the publisher of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer. By chronicling hundreds of heart-stopping details from dozens of sources across decades of dangerous behavior, O’Brien’s work sets a brave and timely example for how to report on extremism responsibly.

“Roads symbolize one of the fundamental contracts between a government and its citizens,” Dale Maharidge reports in Harper’s Magazine, with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “If the roads are failing, it means government is failing.”

Legendary long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad tells and owns her story of survival. By tracing the lifelong impact of enduring sexual assault at age 14, Nyad — now nearing 70 as an undeniable champion in every decade of her life — builds a powerful case for speaking out.

“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale.” James Bridle traces a profoundly disturbing digital trail through “industrialized nightmare production,” flagging a long tail of iterative violence that human oversight is powerless to contain.

After having epiphanies about the downsides of persuasive design, several young creators of addictive smartphone technology abandon their posts at Google, Twitter, and Facebook to try to become part of the solution.

Helen Rosner’s loving ode to Olive Garden, another chapter in Eater’s Death of Chains series on the slow decline of middlebrow chain restaurants.