BEN MAUK
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Illustration: Danica Novgorodoff
The Believer | 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. Before, at the police station, they’d given me a medical exam. They’d taken a blood sample. I couldn’t understand what my sentence was—what I’d done wrong.

​[Read in The Believer] [PDF]
[Læs på dansk]

Finalist, National Magazine Award, Best Illustrated Story
Winner, Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism
Winner, The Reporting Award, NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
​Best of World, Longform Best of 2019

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
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

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Photo: Balazs Gardi
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]

Winner, Western Writers of America, Best Short Nonfiction
Notable Mention, Best American Travel Writing 2018

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
The New York Times Magazine | February 3, 2019
​Trillion-Dollar Nowhere

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In the remote steppes of Central Asia, 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

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Photo: Thomas Dworzak
Virginia Quarterly Review | Spring 2019
​Mountain of Tongues


Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world's most scattered people?

[Read in VQR] [PDF]


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Photo: Valerie Schmidt
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]

Finalist, National Magazine Award, Feature Writing
Citation, Ed Cunningham Award, Overseas Press Club
Winner, 
Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction

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Photo: Carleen Coulter
New York Review of Books | NYR Daily
​Pandemic Journal: Penang


Wheelbarrows of durian had no buyers.
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[Read in NYRB] [PDF]

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Photo: Ben Mauk
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]

Winner, The Reporting Award, NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

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Photo: Elaine Treharne
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]

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Photo: Jasper Kettner
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]

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Photo: Pacific Standard
Pacific Standard | January 30, 2019 | Online
The Last Uranium Prospector

America's mid-century uranium boom changed the face of the West. Meet the man at the center of its secret afterlife.

[Read in Pacific Standard] [PDF]

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Photo: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Maureen Paley / Photo Solutions
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]

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Photo: Ben Mauk
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.
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​[Read in Granta]

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Photo: Ben Mauk
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]

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Photo: Ali Ali / EPA
The New Yorker | Online

Reporting on art crimes, mysteries, asylum rights, and more.

[Read at The New Yorker]

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