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Catch-up Wednesday: 3 midweek longreads
Get up to speed with the latest news, opinions and insights with our hand-picked in-depth reads.
IT’S MIDWAY THROUGH the week and you want to get up to speed on the latest news topics and catch up on opinions and insights.
We’re here to help you do just that, with our three midweek longreads:
Jon Gertner journeys behind the doors of Google X, to find out what exactly goes on inside the secretive innovation lab.
(Fast Company, approx 32 minutes reading time, 6424 words)
Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself–an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company’s business.
James Harkin takes on the story of two colleagues, Austin Tice and Jim Foley, who vanished in Syria in 2012. What became of them?
(Vanity Fair, approx 11 minutes reading time, 2386 words)
“So that’s why I came here to Syria,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “and it’s why I like being here now, right now, right in the middle of a brutal and still uncertain civil war. Every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment. They accept that reality as the price of freedom…. ”
Larry Donnelly looks at the legacy of the Boston marathon bombings a year ago, in a city still trying to recover from the tragedy.
(TheJournal.ie, approx 5 minutes reading time, 1000 words)
But together with the people of Boston and of the broader New England region, we are remembering the lives that were lost and forever altered one year ago by the actions of two lone madmen, the Tsarnaev brothers. They had immigrated to the US and been accepted by the people they met in a far more open society than the ones they had known. Perhaps above all else, that’s what makes what they did so inexplicable.
Want some more longreads? Then check out Sitdown Sunday>
