BEN MAUK
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Photo: Sabiha Çimen/Magnum
The New York Times Magazine
The Long Road from Xinjiang


He fled brutal repression — only to discover, as so many Uyghur refugees have, that China’s power stretches far beyond its borders.

[Read in The New York Times] [PDF]
The Sunday Long Read Favorite | Financial Times Best of 2024

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
The New York Times Magazine
Mountain Time


Can the first long-distance trail in Kurdistan knit together a nation?

​[Read in The New York Times] [PDF]
[Italiano] [Deutsch]

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Illustration: Matt Huynh
The New Yorker
Inside Xinjiang's Prison State


Survivors detail the scope of China’s campaign of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities, including "reeducation" camps, prison sentences, forced sterilization, and coerced labor.

​[Read in The New Yorker] [PDF]
[Listen to The New Yorker Radio Hour episode]
Peabody Award | Online Journalism Award for Excellence in Immersive Storytelling | Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling | Deadline Club Award | Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence | Longreads Best of 2021

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Illustration: Matt Huynh
The New Yorker
Reeducated

A New Yorker Documentary in Virtual Reality

A 360-degree documentary takes viewers inside one of Xinjiang’s secretive “reeducation” camps.

[Watch the film]
[Watch "How Reeducated Was Made"]
Emmy Award | ​Peabody Award | Special Jury Recognition for Immersive Journalism at SXSW | Special Jury Prize at NewImages Festival | Grand Prize at VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival | Venice Biennale Best of VR Selection

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Photo: Carleen Coulter
Granta Magazine
The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central


A friend in Quezon City sent me a text message: ‘You’ve arrived in disaster season!’

[Read in Granta] [PDF]
Longreads Best of 2021

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
The New York Times Magazine
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 | Longform Best Article

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Illustration: Danica Novgorodoff
The Believer
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]
[Dansk]
National Magazine Award finalist | Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism | The Reporting Award from New York University | ​Longform Best of World | The Believer Best of the Decade

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Photo: Balazs Gardi
Harper's Magazine
​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 from Western Writers of America

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
The New York Times Magazine
​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

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Photo: Thomas Dworzak
Virginia Quarterly Review
​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
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 in feature writing | Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction | ​Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence 

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Photo: Andrea Frazzetta
London Review of Books
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]

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Illustration: Enrique Quintero
Virginia Quarterly Review
Shadows, Tokens, Spring


In the depths of the Great Manchurian Plague, which claimed sixty thousand lives between 1910 and 1911, it became impossible to dispose of the proliferating dead. 
​
​[Read in VQR] [PDF]
Featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

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Photo: Elaine Treharne
The New Yorker
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
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: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Maureen Paley / Photo Solutions
frieze
​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
London Review of Books
On an Arson Epidemic


Towns across Germany have placed asylum seekers in disused factories, motels and parish houses. Every two to three days, someone tries to burn one to the ground.

​[Read in LRB] [PDF]

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