If restitution advocates have their way, Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum may mark the beginning of the end of an era in which Western museums served as humble custodians of other peoples’ things.
“Hermann Baumann wasn’t yet a Nazi when he set sail to Angola in search of Chokwe treasure.”
Read the full feature story: Tortoise
Read and watch our BBC Future series Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
Read: BBC
A medical testing center in downtown Laayoune. Image: Kang-Chun Cheng.
When it comes to Covid-19, Western Sahara is a black hole: no information exists. The area is literally a blank spot on the World Health Organization’s map of cases and vaccines.
Read: BBC Future
With support from the Pulitzer Center
Illustration Corey Brickley for The Economist
A senior member of the Medellín cartel conned American and Swiss authorities, framed the Mexican president’s brother, destroyed a private Swiss bank, and brought down the Attorney General of Switzerland.
And they let him walk free.
In fact, they paid him to do it. Law enforcement agencies across the globe are giving millions of dollars to criminal informants, creating a system where–for big fish like José Manuel Ramos–crime truly does pay.
Read: The Economist’s 1843 Magazine
A Vespucci Story, with Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann
Jacob Kushner
In Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the lakes are flooding farmland, swallowing communities and leading to deforestation, baffling climate scientists.
Jacob Kushner
Story and photos by Jacob Kushner for National Geographic
Story and photos by Jacob Kushner
The campaign to expel the children of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic is impractical. Their labor—and that of their parents—helped propel the Dominican economy last year to grow faster than all but one other country’s in Latin America, firmly establishing it as a middle-class nation. They are a significant part of the workforce in the booming construction and tourism industries that have helped transform the Dominican Republic into the most popular travel destination in the Caribbean.
But in a chaotic democracy that has adopted 38 different constitutions over a century and a half, anti-Haitianismo is the one enduring notion that mainstream parties across the political spectrum can invoke with impunity. It is driven by the fervor of Dominican nationalists, and, in particular, by one powerful, ultra-conservative family and its allies. Together, they are waging a political, legal and media war to defend the Dominican Republic against what they believe is the nation’s gravest threat: Haitian immigrants and their children.
Read: Moment Magazine
Photos and Story by Jacob Kushner for NACLA.
Story and Photography by Jacob Kushner for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and Type Investigations.
American evangelicals’ antigay gospel forced him to flee Uganda. Then Christians in California offered him a home. A refugee’s story, in words and pictures.
Read: The Atavist
Jesse Lenz
German authorities looked the other way as a right-wing terrorist cell went on a seven-year killing spree. Now they won’t look in the mirror.
Read: Foreign Policy Magazine
As featured on Longform
Andrew Renneisen
As dawn breaks, nine Kenya Wildlife Service rangers dressed in camouflage and brandishing rifles assemble at an airstrip. They are equipped with a Cessna, a helicopter, and a caravan of Toyota Land Cruisers. Their mission: find, tranquilize, and collar Tsavo’s savanna elephants to see how well they traverse a new rail line that has recently split their habitat in two. It is the first time in history that elephants are being collared specifically to study how they interact with human infrastructure.
Photo/Amy Lombard
Meet Fathom, the world’s first-ever cruise for voluntourists: vacationers who don’t just want to do beaches, spas, and shopping, but do good.
Spoiler: It doesn’t go as planned.
Update: Two weeks after my VICE investigation published, Carnival Corp., the world’s largest cruise operator, announced it would discontinue the cruise.
Published in the November 2016 issue of
Listen: Tiny Spark
Allison Shelley
Uncertainty over land ownership is playing out across Haiti as the country attempts to attract foreign investment in tourism, mining, manufacturing, and agriculture—often without clear knowledge of who, precisely, owns what.
Read: The New Yorker
