Ben Taub

Sep 9, 2024 | rsn.org | Ben Taub

For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe. It was polar winter, one long night. The lakes had frozen in the Far North, and the foxes and the grouse had shed their brown fur and feathers in favor of Arctic white. To survive the months of snow and ice, predators resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their prey.

Sep 9, 2024 | newyorker.com | Ben Taub

In today’s newsletter, the story behind our astounding new reporting about Russia’s escalating spy games. And then:• Donald Trump’s new “voodoo economics”• The chaos at Columbia continues• Are your morals too good to be true? There is a common trope in journalism about the Arctic—that the melting of polar ice is setting up a geopolitical competition over resources that evokes the “Great Game,” the nineteenth-century British and Russian rivalry in Central and South Asia.

Sep 9, 2024 | newyorker.com | Ben Taub |“By our own.”

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. In the small town of Kirkenes—in the northeastern corner of Norway, six miles from the Russian border—the regional counterintelligence chief, Johan Roaldsnes, peered out his office window at the fjord below. There were eight Russian fishing trawlers docked outside, housing at least six hundred Russian sailors. The phone rang. The caller was a government employee who worked at the local port.

Dec 13, 2023 | quicktelecast.com | James Lasdun |Ben Taub |Ronan Farrow |Nathan Heller

News exhaustion is a miasma that has afflicted almost all of us for some time now. We're drained by the physical and mental exertion that comes with following current events. The state of alarm--over American democracy, the pandemic, the climate, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and myriad smaller crises--has been near-constant. Our cortisol levels have been elevated for far too long.

Dec 13, 2023 | newyorker.com | Michael Luo |James Lasdun |Ben Taub |Ronan Farrow

I’ve been the editor of newyorker.com since early 2017 and have, naturally, paid close attention to our readers’ habits. The list of the most popular New Yorker stories of 2023, as measured by “engaged minutes”—the total amount of time readers spent on them—is striking to me for what is missing. No war in Gaza. No Trump. No politics. The top story is a true-crime tale by James Lasdun, about the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.