Letter from Ukraine
The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine
by Joshua Yaffa

As occupied territories are liberated, some residents face accusations that they sided with the enemy.

Letter from Tbilisi
Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War
by Elif Batuman

How to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Onegin,” and other beloved books.

Letter from Italy
The Crisis of Missing Migrants
by Alexis Okeowo

What has become of the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe?

A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression
by Peter Hessler

How had the country experienced so much social, economic, and educational change while its politics remained stagnant?

Letter from Kyiv
The Holocaust Memorial Undone by Another War
by Masha Gessen

After eighty years, the site of a mass execution of Jews was about to be commemorated. Then Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

China’s Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class
by Peter Hessler

My students from the nineteen-nineties grew up in rural poverty. Now they’re in their forties, and their country is unrecognizable.

Can Russia’s Press Ever Be Free?
by Masha Gessen

The journalists of Novaya Gazeta report on dangerous conflicts—and endure threats of their own.

A Black Communist’s Disappearance in Stalin’s Russia
by Joshua Yaffa

What happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the only known African American to die in the Gulag?

The Mysterious Origins of the Cerne Abbas Giant
by Rebecca Mead

On a hillside ages ago, people inscribed a naked man with a twenty-six-foot-long erect penis. Why did they do it?

Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses
by Francesca Mari

As the pandemic makes an already terrible housing crisis worse, a new version of house-sitting signals a broken real-estate market.