This week we have stories from David Roth, Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg, Thomas Dai, Cameron Maynard, and Katherine Rundell.
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Meet the Superusers Behind IMDB, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site
“Powered by obsessed film buffs, it’s a crowdsourced juggernaut that’s older than Google and Wikipedia. Now AI is threatening to steal the starring role.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we feature stories from Gordy Megroz, Max Blau and Zaydee Sanchez, Brendan I. Koerner, Lora Eli Smith, and Pat Cassels.
Land Ownership Makes No Sense
“The earth is a shared inheritance, and profiting off a common resource is just wrong.”
Margaret Atwood Is Ready to Let It Rip
“With exactly nothing to prove and no one left to impress, she seemed happiest bantering.”
On the Trail of the Fentanyl King
“An Iraqi translator for the US military emigrated to Texas to start a new life. He ended up becoming one of the biggest drug dealers on the dark web.”
A Year in Reading: The Dark Side of Progress
We’re moving farther, faster, than ever before. But we’re also destabilizing crucial areas of human experience.
How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco
“When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.”
The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat
“Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests. Users just have to trust that it won’t.”
The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack
“One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and utterly failed—to simulate it.”

