The long read: How one magic word became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power

Peter Minton was riding his motorized scooter on Rockaway Beach Boulevard when the patrolman served him with a summons to appear in traffic court. The reason: the 16-year-old was operating the vehicle without a driver’s license.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The remarkable inside story of one journalist’s quest to uncover the true costs of industrial farming to the environment, people & animals

A dying rainforest will release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but the Piaraçu Manifesto taps ancestral wisdom to preserve traditional lands.

While social media and mass communication technology have made connecting easier than ever, loneliness -- the sadness that comes from a perceived lack of social connection -- has been recognized as a serious problem. Tech is trying to help.

What is the first thing you do when you get a new pair of headphones? Some of us might unbox it and put up an Instagram story. Others might immediately put on their favourite playlist and crank up the bass. However, if you ask any audiophile what they do with a new pair of headphones, their answer will most likely be: burning them in. Audiophiles are discerning music listeners who are motivated to get the very best sound quality out of their headphones, speakers, and audio equipment in general.

Show me a museum of important historical inventors and I will show you a gallery of deluded mass murderers. I’m not talking about machine gun manufacturers or nuclear scientists—those people, at least, have some sense of what they’re up to. I’m talking about the folks behind the printing press, the automobile, various kinds of boat technology. These people tried to improve the world, and succeeded, but also indirectly killed millions of people.

To lure Sears into a Chicago suburb, officials crafted the largest tax break package ever awarded to a company in Illinois. It resulted in revenue shortfalls, disappearing jobs and unexpected tax burdens, a Daily Herald and ProPublica review showed.

Regina Brave remembers the moment the first viral picture of her was taken. It was 1973, and 32-year-old Brave had taken up arms in a standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Brave had been assigned to guard a bunker on the front lines and was holding a rifle when a reporter leaped from a car to snap her photo.

You’ve never heard of Yuji Ijiri. But back in 1989 he created something incredible. It’s more revolutionary than the cotton gin, the steam engine, the PC and the smart phone combined. When people look back hundreds of years from now, only the printing press and the Internet will have it beat for sheer mind-boggling impact on society. Both the net and the printing press enabled the democratization of information and single-handedly uplifted the collective knowledge of people all over the world.

Virtual reality tore me out of my filter bubble. I met people I probably would never have met in material reality. I felt close to people, I hung out with them in a social VR room for weeks — and only on my long journey to Kuwait, Israel, and the US, where I finally visited them in their material lives, did I realize how far away these people are “in reality.” But this distance did not hinder us from having real relationships.

One of the ultimate symbols of luxury and affluence is private jet travel. From the dawn of the Learjet-era to today’s ultra-long-range large-cabin jets, the most wealthy people in the world enjoy the unparalleled freedom and privilege that private jets provide. For such an intriguing and vaunted domain, there are a lot of misconceptions about it and the finances required to play within it. With this in mind, we dive into what traveling on and even owning one of these flying 'time machines' really costs and why they are so popular.

The long read: Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it

In 2014, Giles Nicholson was battling the growing year from hell. A mild winter followed by a warm, wet spring had turbocharged a ferocious mass of cow parsley, nettles and dense grass along the hundreds of miles of road his team maintains for Dorset council. Austerity meant there was barely enough money to pay for repeated cuttings to hold back the matted swards. Complaints poured in about messy roadsides.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 report on the Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918, which reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

The long read: After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious

The long read: For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others...

In July 2018 (when we first published this piece), there was a minor uproar when Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, who is all of 22, appeared on the cover of Forbes’s 60 richest self-made women issue. As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous. She built a successful cosmetics company — now valued at $900 million, according to Forbes — not just with hard work but on a towering foundation of good luck.

That’s how long I want to live: 75 years. This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.