Holland is home to a thriving community of journalists and bloggers who cover criminals and the drug trade. Those writers are often targeted by their subjects — and so was Martin Kok.
By Kenneth R. Rosen
Squeeze the trigger of a gun and a spring unwinds. A bolt lurches forward. On that piece of precision-milled steel is a firing pin that ignites a spark and initiates a sequence of events which, if the human will is powerful enough and mechanical tolerance is not exceeded, often ends in death. And tolerance for Martin Kok was running out.
As a teenager living north of Amsterdam, Kok sold fish and later cocaine. He was nicknamed the Stutterer, for an affliction he would never quite overcome, and he went to prison multiple times — twice for…
Inside Fort Gordon, where the military’s next generation of cyber troops is training to fight the endless war — through a computer screen.
By Matt Gallagher
Satellite dishes mark the main gate of Fort Gordon, eggshell white and lasering up at the moon. It’s a modest shrine, as these things go. Many military bases put machines of might on the front porch — tanks or helos or jumbo artillery guns — but the dishes fit Fort Gordon just fine. They’re subtle. They’re quiet.
Inside the gates it’s more of the same. Fort Gordon sits in a soft Georgian basin, the traditional home of the US Army Signal Corps. Signal has been around since the Civil War and has long been responsible for military…
Jeff Bezos may be the richest man of the modern age, but he built his e-commerce empire by playing freely with new ideas — not disrupting swaths of industries
By Felix Salmon
Amazon is one of the largest and most formidable companies in the world. It’s run with brutal efficiency, a keen focus on keeping its customers happy, and a deep thirst for innovation. Its $50 billion of revenue per quarter makes the company worth more than $850 billion, which is enough to buy Walmart three times over and still have more than $100 billion in change. (It’s also enough to make founder Jeff Bezos the richest man in modern history.) …
Buried in media scholar Jonathan Albright’s research was proof of a massive political misinformation campaign. Now he’s taking on the the world’s biggest platforms before it’s too late
By Issie Lapowsky
When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Within days, ultraconservative YouTube stars like Alex Jones had rallied their supporters behind the bogus claim that the students who survived and took to the press to call for gun control were merely actors. Within a week, one of these videos had topped YouTube’s Trending section.
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The closed group was taken over by abusive trolls, raising questions about Facebook’s ability to monitor spaces designed for sharing intimate information
By Louise Matsakis
Last year, as thousands of women shared their stories of sexual assault and harassment with the hashtag #MeToo, Amanda, a 30-year-old from Oregon, was looking for a supportive place to share her own experiences. Soon enough she was invited by a friend to join a Facebook group for survivors of sexual assault that had thousands of members.
The group was easy to find: As recently as July, the page associated with it ranked higher in some search results than the #MeToo page verified by Facebook. The group, which also had “me too” in the name, looked legitimate…
Selfies may not be cool anymore, but their spirit lives on — just as it always has
By Margaret Andersen
The duck face, the fish gape, the smize — these are just a few of the time-honored poses that celebrities, influencers, and the Instagram-happy masses have relied upon to create perfect selfies. But a lot has changed since the early aughts, when people first started training their smartphone lenses on themselves. Today, selfie-takers can achieve poreless, doll-like symmetry through feature enhancing apps like FaceTune, or they can hire on-demand photographers through ElsiePic to capture their adventures for them so they can remain “in the moment.”
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are redefining the underground culinary world, and young chefs are eliminating gatekeepers while they cater to poor communities and celebs alike. Exhibit A: Ghetto Gastro.
By Jason Parham
The palazzo-style building in the heart of the Bronx known as Andrew Freedman Home was once a retirement refuge for rich New Yorkers who fell on hard times. Today it’s a sprawling event and gallery space. It stands majestically on a tract of lawn behind a neat procession of trees that have gone naked on this crisp, overcast Tuesday in February. Outside the lawn’s gate, an apartment-packed stretch of Grand Concourse is furious with movement and sound. …
Faced with runaway inflation and a weak national currency, Venezuelans are turning to cryptocurrencies to store savings and conduct some transactions.
By Cady Voge
When Juan Pinto gets in line at the movie theater, he takes out his phone and trades just enough bitcoin for Venezuelan bolivars to pay for the ticket by the time he gets to the counter. Pinto lives in Venezuela, but doesn’t keep any of his money in the national currency. The 29-year-old quit his job as a mechanical engineer to dedicate his life to cryptocurrency three years ago, when he says he “fell in love with the technology.” Venezuela’s crumbling economy played a part as well. …
Five years ago Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn’t go as planned — forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition.
By Jessi Hempel
In August 2013, Mark Zuckerberg tapped out a 10-page white paper on his iPhone and shared it on Facebook. It was intended as a call to action for the tech industry: Facebook was going to help get people online. Everyone should be entitled to free basic internet service, Zuckerberg argued. Data was, like food or water, a human right. Universal basic internet service is possible, he wrote, but “it isn’t going to happen by itself.” Wiring the world required powerful players — institutions like Facebook. …
The processor that makes your laptop or cell phone work was fabricated using quartz from this obscure Appalachian backwater.
By Vince Beiser
In the digital age, the jobs we work at, the entertainment we divert ourselves with, and the ways we communicate with one another are increasingly defined by the internet and the computers, tablets, and cell phones that connect us to it. None of this would be possible were it not for sand.
The processor that makes your laptop or cell phone work was fabricated using quartz from this obscure Appalachian backwater.
Fresh from church on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, Alex Glover slides onto the plastic bench of a McDonald’s booth. He…
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