Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
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The New York Times Magazine | April 24, 2022
Mountain Time There is a project underway to build a 150-mile-long hiking trail through the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq — from the Nineveh Plains to the snow-covered mountains that border Iran. Can the first long-distance trail in Kurdistan knit together a nation? [Read in The New York Times] [PDF] |
Illustration: Matt Huynh
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The New Yorker | February 26, 2021
Inside Xinjiang's Prison State Survivors detail the scope of China’s campaign of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities, including “reëducation” camps, prison sentences, coerced labor, and other methods of forced assimilation. [Read in The New Yorker] [PDF] [Listen to The New Yorker Radio Hour episode] Online Journalism Award, Excellence in Immersive Storytelling Online Journalism Award, Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling Deadline Club Award, Digital Innovation Citation for Excellence, Overseas Press Club Best of 2021: No.1 Story Picks, Longreads |
Illustration: Matt Huynh
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The New Yorker | March 18, 2021
Reeducated A New Yorker Documentary in Virtual Reality A 360-degree virtual-reality documentary takes viewers inside one of Xinjiang’s “reëducation” camps, guided by the recollections of three men who were imprisoned together at a facility in Tacheng. [Watch the film] [Watch "How Reeducated Was Made"] Special Jury Recognition for Immersive Journalism, SXSW Special Jury Prize, NewImages Festival Grand Prize, VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival Best of VR Selection, Venice Biennale |
Photo: Carleen Coulter
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Granta Magazine | Issue 157
The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central Mayon smoldered and glowed but did not erupt the season of our arrival in Manila. Taal erupted instead. A friend in Quezon City sent me a text message: ‘You’ve arrived in disaster season!’ [Read in Granta] [PDF] Best of 2021: Reported Essays, Longreads |
Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
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The New York Times Magazine | April 1, 2018
The Floating World Persecuted on land, members of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority take shelter in improvised villages spread across the surface of the Mekong River’s waterways. [Read in The New York Times] [PDF] Featured in Best American Travel Writing 2019 Best Article, Longform |
Illustration: Danica Novgorodoff
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The Believer | Issue 127 | October-November 2019
Weather Reports: Voices from Xinjiang An oral history of China's mass internment drive It was in some mountainous place. We drove out in a windowless van with a metal grate inside. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t understand what my sentence was—what I’d done wrong. [Read in The Believer] [PDF] [Læs på dansk] National Magazine Award (finalist), Best Illustrated Story Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism The Reporting Award, New York University Best of World, Longform Best of the Decade, The Believer |
Photo: Balazs Gardi
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Harper's Magazine | October 2017
States of Decay Someone told me I could find a reclaimed uranium mill in Tuba City, so I drove up from Flagstaff through the Arizona badlands. [Read in Harper's] [PDF] Spur Award for Best Short Nonfiction, Western Writers of America Notable Mention, Best American Travel Writing 2018 |
Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
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The New York Times Magazine | February 3, 2019 | Cover Story
Trillion-Dollar Nowhere In the remote steppes of eastern Kazakhstan, China is establishing the next foothold in its trillion-dollar campaign to transform global infrastructure. [Read in The New York Times] [PDF] Featured in Best American Travel Writing 2020 |
Photo: Thomas Dworzak
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Virginia Quarterly Review | Spring 2019 | Cover Story
Mountain of Tongues Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world's most scattered people? [Read in VQR] [PDF] |
Photo: Valerie Schmidt
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Virginia Quarterly Review | Spring 2017
The Useful Village In the fall of 2015, Germany designated Sumte, population 102, as a sanctuary for nearly 800 refugees. What followed was a living experiment in the country’s principles. [Read in VQR] [PDF] [Read abridged version in The Guardian] National Magazine Award (finalist), Feature Writing Ed Cunningham Award (citation), Overseas Press Club Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, VQR |
Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
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London Review of Books | Vol. 41 No. 18
Prisons in the Mountains In August 2018 I was in Zharkent, a market town in Kazakhstan near the Chinese border, reporting on the extradition trial of an asylum seeker named Sayragul Sauytbay. [Read in LRB] [PDF] The Reporting Award, New York University |
Photo: Elaine Treharne
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The New Yorker | Online
Scattered Leaves In 2013, a Stanford medievalist accidentally discovered a secret world of art dealers who destroy artifacts to sell their disjecta membra. I decided to track one down. [Read in The New Yorker] |
Photo: Jasper Kettner
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frieze | Issue 203 | May 2019
We'll Burn Your Pavilions Can Natascha Süder Happelmann succeed in doing away with national ‘representation’ altogether? [Read in frieze] [PDF] |
Photo: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Maureen Paley / Photo Solutions
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frieze | Issue 196 | June - August 2018
Hearing Things If we have learned anything from the age of for-profit surveillance and deep-state data, it is that someone out there is listening. [Read in frieze] [PDF] |
Photo: Ben Mauk
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Granta Magazine | Issue 137 | Online
A Land without Strangers All nations strive toward the superlative. Poland happens to be one of the most homogenous countries on earth. [Read in Granta] |
Photo: Ben Mauk
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London Review of Books | Vol. 38 No. 18
Diary (On an Arson Epidemic) As towns across Germany have accepted their federal allocation of asylum seekers, administrators have fashioned shelters out of disused factories, motels and parish houses. At the moment, someone tries to burn one of these improvised hostels to the ground every two to three days. [Read in LRB] [PDF] |