Editor's Picks

Editor’s Picks is not a section anyone files to. It is a shelf: the reports we would hand to someone opening this site for the first time, chosen for being complete, sourced and still readable long after the week they describe. Every one of them also sits in the desk it was filed to.

The shelf is rebuilt with the site rather than by hand, from the longest and best-illustrated reports across the desks, with a cap of two per desk so one subject cannot take the whole page. If you would rather see everything in the order it was published, The Wire is the full feed.

The desk holds 12 reports filed between November 1, 2023 and September 24, 2026, 2 of them written by this newsroom. Newest sits first, and the date under a headline is the date it was published.

A report belongs to one desk, and the address it was published at does not change afterwards: renaming a section does not move a page, so a link saved years ago still opens the same report. Where a story touches two subjects it stays in the desk it was filed to, and the same page is also reachable from the writer it belongs to.

The order on this page is by date, not by how much traffic a report draws, and long pieces are listed on the same terms as short ones. If a fact in one of them is wrong, the newsroom address takes corrections: the fix is written onto the report itself, with a note saying what changed, rather than published somewhere else.