The Torture Of Tokyo Rush Hour, Up Close And Impersonal
Photographer Michael Wolf spent years documenting the world’s busiest travel system, capturing a claustrophobic nightmare endured by millions traveling across Japan’s capital.

The Last Ship To St. Helena, A Remote Island In The Atlantic
Every third week, a British Royal Mail ship begins its journey from Cape Town to Saint Helena, the remote island in the Atlantic where Napoleon was once in exile. Five days, with a northwesterly course, and only then do the sheer black cliffs appear in front of RMS St. Helena.

The Problem With Being A Long-Term Expat
People on long-term foreign assignments often find it hard to adjust once they return home. Many leave their company within a few years, and some leave the country entirely. Long absences can play havoc with a person’s sense of identity, a feeling that is intensified by the length of time away and how often they visit home.

Young Girls Force-Fed For Marriage In Mauritania
Some Mauritanian communities believe that the fatter girls look the wealthier and more attractive they appear to men. Sahar Zand meets the families force feeding their young girls a 9,000 calorie-a-day diet during a brutal “feeding season” in Mauritania.

Detroit’s Salt Mine: A City Beneath The City
This gigantic mine, 1,160 feet beneath the surface, spreads out under Detroit over more than 1,400 acres with 50 miles of roads. A huge sea covering the region evaporated more than 400 million years ago, forming salt deposits that were gradually buried by glacial activity.

Young Refugees Document The Squalor, And Hope, Around Them
More than 4,100 refugees live in Samos Reception and Identification Center in Greece, a compound built for 650, awaiting their fate. Some have been here for years, and they include people from dozens of nations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. They also include some 1,200 children, many of them unaccompanied minors.

Chasing Colombia’s ‘Cocaine Hippos’
After the Colombian National Police killed Escobar in 1993, zoos and private collectors acquired the animals, all except the hippopotamuses. They are only hippos in the wild outside Africa. Escobar started with four hippos. Today, a UC San Diego biologist estimates there are 80 to 100.

Italy’s Crumbling Motorways: How The Genoa Bridge Collapse Exposed A National Scandal
The state of Italian motorways is a national scandal. There are about twenty badly-damaged motorway bridges in Italy currently under investigation. There are also 200 illegal tunnels, which don’t comply with European standards and 1,000 viaducts which haven’t been monitored for years.

Tokyo In The 1970s, A Pre-Blade Runner City, Amazing Unseen Photos By Greg Girard
To mark the release of his latest book, ‘Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983’, Greg Girard has shared a collection of largely unseen images offering a nostalgic glimpse of the Japanese capital before it exploded into the hyper-modern metropolis we know today.

Disneyfication: Oversize Commercial Images Covering Up Less Glamorous Reality
Theo Derksen’s Disneyfication has been over twenty years in the making. A book of vivid color double-page spreads, it offers a global vision of the oversize invasion of visual imagery in metropolises including Bucharest, Berlin, Egypt, Tokyo, Dubai, Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore and Las Vegas.

Striking Street Photography In Japan By James Takumi Shyegun
Stunning street scenes by James Takumi Shyegun, a talented photographer, videographer, and model from Tokyo, Japan. Takumi focuses mainly on urban, architecture, and street photography.

Lucie Rox’s New Zine Captures The Quiet, Soft Side Of Life In Japan
SIGNS, a new zine of pictures taken in Japan from Paris-born photographer Lucie Rox, is about the joy of exploring new places. It’s a series that encapsulates the feeling of traveling and “being taken by the novelty of the streets, objects and people living their everyday life in front you.”

Why Elon Musk And Jack Dorsey Have Big Plans For Africa
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, Inc, raised some eyebrows in Silicon Valley when he announced he was moving to Africa in 2020. Africa is poised to take off as the next big tech market, and both America and China have taken notice.

26 Hours On A Saharan Freight Train
Mauritania’s Train du Desert is one of the longest and heaviest trains in the world. Completed in 1963, the train operates daily between Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast and the iron ore mines in Zouerat, in the middle of the country—a journey of around 450 miles that takes about 13 hours each way.

Photoprovocations By Russian Sergey Chilikov
Photography wasn’t given credence as a legitimate art form and even classic Soviet photography wasn’t included in museum exhibitions. In order to get their work seen, photographers started their own clubs, exchanging work with other clubs and organizing their own exhibitions and festivals.

The Most Extreme Railway In The World
At 430 miles long, the formidable Mauritania Railway, nicknamed the “backbone of the Sahara,” boasts some of the longest and heaviest trains in the world. Its journey begins in Zouerat, Mauritania, and runs across the searing desert to the port city of Nouadhibou, on Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Is An Island Off Cuba The Last Surviving Piece Of East Germany?
The Unification Treaty signed in August 1990 re-Germanied the Germanies, and that West Germany (now known as “Germany”) inherited East Germany’s territories. But there may have been a tiny oversight. Turns out, there could still be a sliver of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik remaining in the Caribbean, just west of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.

Growing Up Travelling: The Inside World Of Irish Traveller Children
When American photographer Jamie Johnson visited Ireland for the first time in 2014; she immediately felt connected to the Irish travelers living there. She spent the next five years going back to Galway, Limerick, Cork and Tipperary, taking portraits of the communities, particularly the children.

Can One Earthquake Trigger Another On The Other Side Of The World?
It’s well known that natural disasters can cause others in their immediate vicinity, for instance, hurricanes are often accompanied by flooding, and earthquakes are followed by aftershocks. But what about longer distance interactions? Could one earthquake trigger another on the other side of the world?

Who Killed Two Journalists In Ukraine? And Why?
An investigation and trial has answered some of the questions about what happened to Andrei Mironov and the Italian photographer he was accompanying. Yet so much remains uncertain. Theirs is a story of the murky nature of facts in a war zone. It’s a story of elusive moral clarity in a land where death comes from who knows where.

The Brazilian Town Where The American Confederacy Lives On
Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. The Confederados in Americana, Brazil, are one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.