1. Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic (2016)

Coates doesn’t take very long to crack his knuckles in this piece, which is focused on wannabe Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders, but actually demolishes every candidate in the field. Reviewing the man’s inability to properly address issues of race relations and reparations, Coates exposes — and guts — an ideology which is more theoretical than real. True, splitterist claims of “Not radical enough” are a pretty familiar way for the political left to eat itself and hand power to the right. But as the argument lays out, since radicalism is being painted as Sanders’ core value, it seems more than appropriate to skewer him for a lack of it.

2. A Letter From Vincent van Gogh to His Brother Theo

Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Letters (1888)

We have such a need to take our artists and embellished them, emboss them, craft them into heroic myths. Even van Gogh, one of the most broken of them all, is usually elevated into an archetype rather than a person. So there’s something utterly human about the way this letter (written to his brother one summer) shows us the mundane, lusty, earthy side of the man — there’s a sequence about erections — before it twists itself into a haunting meditation.

3. Why Does It Take So Long to Mend an Escalator?

Peter Campbell, London Review of Books (2002)

Escalators have always struck me as a bizarre kind of technological mind trick, a Potemkin village of transportation. Their invention opened up new possibilities — look, you can build things deeper underground! — and yet, for the most part, any given escalator seems to spend a great deal of its life not really working. I used to think this was a British disease, struggling around the non-operative escalators of the London Underground. Then I moved to San Francisco, where the central question question of this article seems to be a mantra. This exploration, by the late Peter Campbell, of the whys seems as relevant now as when it was written.

4. Joe and Harpo’s Walk in East Finchley

Joe Craig (2016)

Another exceedingly British moment, this time involving a dog, a crime and a moment of farce. It all comes in a string of tweets, an art form that really has developed its own set of rules in the last couple of years.

5. Consciousness is a Big Suitcase

John Brockman and Marvin Minsky, Edge (1998)

Minsky, who died this past week, was not just a pioneer or a prophet of artificial intelligence; He was also one of its foremost philosophers. Among all the remembrances, and cap-doffing to his genius, it seems a more fitting tribute to let him explain himself in his own words.

Oh yeah, and here are your added extras, courtesy of Matter.

Ghost Boat

This one is my baby; a live, active search to find 243 missing refugees that combines narrative reporting and crowdsourcing. We did it this sprawling, complicated, unfeasible way because, weirdly, it seemed like the only way to tell an impossible story. Now we’re eight episodes, several months, and about a zillion updates in, but the best place to start is right at the beginning. Everyone involved in this effort — and the team behind this includes Eric Reidy, Gianni Cipriano and Noah Rabinowitz, along with support from Rachel Glickhouse, Rebecca Cohen and a lot of other people — has surprised me with their dedication and resourcefulness.