Man using tablet

Josh Taylor, journalist

“You draw it: what got better or Worse during Obama’s presidency” by Larry Buchanan, Haeyoun Park and Adam Pearce in The New York Times

Did violent crimes per 100,000 people increase or decrease during Obama’s term? What about the number of Mexicans living stateside illegally? The number of troops in Afghanistan? The unemployment rate?

Dan Wood, subeditor

“The street where you don’t go” by Rohan Thomson (photos) and Jenny Noyes (words) in The Sydney Morning Herald

“Although the last wet T-shirt competition took place in 2010 and the last organised nude show was in 2012, the hangover after more than two decades of catering explicitly to the male bonding market is understandably hard to shake. And nowhere is that hangover more searingly apparent than on the stretch of road dubbed ‘Tuff Street’.”

Cass Knowlton, editor

“How jokes won the election” by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker

“Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left — and every combination of the four was labelled ‘satire.’ In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?”

Sophie Benjamin, engagement editor

“The coming tech backlash” by Ross Mayfield on linkedin.com

“Fifty percent of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way.”

Sally Whyte, deputy editor

“Nick Kyrgios, the most confusing athlete in the world” by Sam Duncan in The Age

“I can’t even figure out whether I want him to win or lose. Just when I am convinced he’s one of the good guys, he does something good guys generally don’t do.

“There were periods of the fourth set  where I swear he’d given up. And, there were glimpses of it again in the fifth when the game was on the line.

“Great sportsmen and women just don’t do that. They don’t know how.”

Helen Razer, contributor

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr.

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’.”