News by Publication

Kenya’s railway to nowhere

Articles, The Dial Mag

One morning in March, a Chinese-built train departed the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and headed to the middle of nowhere.

The World Bank warned that building the new SGR would cost 18 times as much as simply rehabilitating damaged or neglected sections of the old one. But Kenya’s leaders cared more about grandiosity than fiscal responsibility. Generations of Kenyans will be paying the price.

Read: The Dial Mag

Too big to jail

The Economist

Illustration Corey Brickley for The Economist

The Colombian drug lord who snitched his way to freedom

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

How Africa’s vaccine hesitancy came from the West

BBC

Immunologist Fatiha El Hilali started trying to counter fake news about vaccines after seeing a close friend die from Covid-19 (Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng)

“If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” said Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris. “A bit like as it is done elsewhere for some studies on Aids. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.”

Read: BBC Future

With support from the Pulitzer Center

The Relentless Rise of Two Caribbean Lakes

National Geographic

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

Birthright Denied

Moment Magazine

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 

PHOTO: U.S. Deportees to Haiti, Jailed Without Cause, Face Severe Health Risks

Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Story and Photography by Jacob Kushner for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and Type Investigations.

Railway Splits Kenya’s Parks, Threatens Wildlife

National Geographic

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.

Read: English | Spanish

A Cruise With a Cause

VICE Magazine

Photo/Amy Lombard

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.

 

Impact 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

VICE Magazine

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