Killing of a Young Woman Grips Iceland

Iceland’s crime rates aren’t typically plagued with carnage—an average of two people are murdered per year—which why the case of Birna Brjansdottir, a 20-year-old sales associate who disappeared after a night out in Reykjavik in early January and whose body was recently found on a beach south of the city, has thrown the country into a tailspin. There have been no arrests so far, though two sailors from Greenland (a country with similarly low crime statistics) have been questioned, so come for the still-unfolding murder mystery and stay for the Viking SWAT Team, the special ops group that features prominently in the investigation.

Published: Jan 23, 2017
Length: 4 minutes (1,200 words)

Cat Marnell is Still Alive

An insightful profile of Cat Marnell, author of the new memoir, How to Murder Your Life, a writer and beauty editor perhaps best known for the self-destructive tendencies that cost her various high-profile jobs and landed her frequently in rehab. Author Emily Gould casts Marnell as more together than many give her credit for, and relatively healthy—at least in her ability to keep rebounding from relapses, and writing about it all cogently and compellingly.

Published: Jan 27, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,017 words)

How New Edition Avoided ‘Heart Break’

“The reality is, and will always be, we were in a moment. Nobody—I don’t think—really understood the history that was being made.” The members of New Edition give an oral history of the making of Heart Break, their quadruple platinum album, originally released in 1988.

Source: The Undefeated
Published: Jan 24, 2017
Length: 20 minutes (5,194 words)

Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

A German magazine reports that a shadowy analytics company with a powerful new tool is swaying elections around the world in favor of hard-right nationalist candidates. The tool, which, according to one study, shows that marketers “can attract up to 63% more clicks and up to 1400% more conversions” on Facebook, works by micro-targeting individuals based on their personality type. The company, Cambridge Analytica, has made the chilling Orwellian claim that it possesses personality profiles of every single adult in the United States. The company worked for the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s campaign, and is rumored to be working with Marine Le Pen.

Source: Das Magazin
Published: Dec 3, 2016
Length: 20 minutes (5,035 words)

In Tbilisi

An excerpt from “A Trip to Tbilisi,” a 2015 work of graphic reportage from journalist, activist, and artist Victoria Lomasko’s visit to the Georgian capital. Her work, drawn live on the scene, focuses on figures on the fringes: migrants, the LGBT community, juvenile prison inmates, sex workers.

Source: n+1
Published: Dec 12, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,471 words)

Murderous Manila: On the Night Shift

“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.

Published: Feb 9, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,416 words)

The Unbearable Niceness of Being

On niceness in publishing, and why we should ask men to do better.

Source: LitHub
Published: Jan 13, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,724 words)

Russia: Life After Trust

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.

Published: Jan 22, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,717 words)

Michele Kirsch: My Life As a Cleaner in London

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.”

Source: The Independent
Published: Oct 25, 2015
Length: 9 minutes (2,481 words)

The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Attacker

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.”

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 24, 2017
Length: 28 minutes (7,011 words)