p5

A collection of some of the best links from around the web, manually curated.

Great links like these, every Friday in your inbox

The Wetsuitman

One of those rare stories that captivate you right from the start and never let you go. Last winter, two bodies washed ashore in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police never managed to identify them. This journalist did. A sad, true story, masterly reported and told.

From Weekly Filet #214, in June 2015.

What is code?

What a beautiful monster of an article. I’m offering you a bet: If you read this now, you’ll remember it in five years time, nah, make that ten years even.

From Weekly Filet #212, in June 2015.

The Untold Story of Silk Road

The thrilling story of the obscure online marketplace Silk Road, often referred to as the Ebay for drugs. Created by one man in 2011, it created more than 1 billion dollars in sales before it was shut down by the FBI (but not before Silk Road’s founder allegedly hired a hitman to kill one of his employees the FBI had tracked down). Great reporting, great storytelling. This is part one, part two will be released on May 14.

From Weekly Filet #206, in May 2015.

My Addiction, Through My Eyes

Photographer Graham MacIndoe has, over several years, captured intense moments of one man’s heroin addiction. His own. In an interview with his girlfriend, who had left him at that time, he speaks about how he slipped into addiction, how he got out and how the self-portraits came about. Well worth your time.

From Weekly Filet #153, in March 2014.

Why we should give free money to everyone

Free money for everyone is one of the stories about Switzerland that have travelled across the globe recently. As Swiss people will get to vote on a basic income, a lot of questions have arisen and remain open. This interesting article from the Netherlands looks at real-life experiments that might prove that free money does not remove incentives to work and leaves everyone better of. I remain skeptical of the idea – mainly for reasons, though, that are not mentioned in the article: It will create a rift between those eligible for a basic income and those who aren’t and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it would lead to ever tighter immigration laws.

From Weekly Filet #148, in January 2014.

60 Words And A War Without End: The Untold Story Of The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History

Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the «Authorization for the Use of Military Force» was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this one broadly-phrased sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Buzzfeed has a brilliant longread on how that sentence came to be, the one woman who voted against it and what it’s since come to mean.

From Weekly Filet #146, in January 2014.

Make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be.

Carefully curated recommendations on what to read, watch and listen to. For nerds and changemakers who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!».

Undecided? Learn more | Peek inside