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Characterised by a traditional linear structure with a sharp focus and a clear beginning, middle, and end to the story. They also feature one or two primary mediums driving the story. Continuous stories tend to be more “lean-back” in nature, meaning there is often less interactivity. Stories are consumed mostly by reading or watching.

These are questions used to qualify a story’s level of continuousness:

1. The project is mostly one continuous narrative.

2. This story has one or two primary media form (e.g. text, video) driving the narrative.

3. This project is more of a “lean-back” or non-interactive experience.

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RADII | Culture, Innovation, and Life in today's China

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27-year-old Zhang Zheyuan is prolific. As a violinist, he's toured with elite performance troupes, traveled the world, and played in Olympic ceremonies. And he's done it all in darkness.

Zheyuan was born with congenital blindness in southwest China's Yunnan province. He attended a special school for the disabled, learning side by side with other blind children, in a program designed to equip them with the kind of barebones skills they'd need to survive and make a living, if they were to eventually emerge on their own into the world. And that is an "if" - there's a tacit understanding that many of the program's students will never achieve true independence.

For China's blind, the default path is massage. Some age-old idea posits that, sans vision, one's sense of touch becomes hyper-developed, allowing blind masseurs to navigate through tensions and knots in the muscles like some kind of bootleg therapeutic Daredevil (having experienced a blind massage, I feel a twang of harsh honesty to recall that it was generally unremarkable). It's unclear whether the tradition remains alive primarily out of a genuine belief in its tenets, or out of a public willingness to accept it as a sort of de facto, self-sustaining social support system.

Around the time when other children were setting off down the one-way road of massage education, Zheyuan was studying violin. As a productive hobby, of course, not a future career.

One evening while practicing at his instructor's home, he recalls, rain began to fall heavily outside. The instructor invited Zheyuan to stay for dinner until the storm cleared, putting a Bach record onto the turntable. Zheyuan ate, awash in the white noise of vinyl crackle and raindrops on windows, taking in the sounds of Bach's compositions. It's worth noting that Bach too endured much hardship in his life, becoming orphaned at age 10 and eventually going blind himself, dying as the result of a botched surgery.

Zheyuan listened to his teacher, of whom Bach was a personal favorite, as he relayed these stories over Art of Fugue. He recounts feeling deeply affected by Bach's ability to transform his trauma and suffering into something beautiful that could move others. When the rain cleared he left with a head full of new ideas.

When Zheyuan told his school, no, I don't want to study massage, I'd actually like to play the violin, he was met with harsh rebuke. Why would someone like Zheyuan want to throw himself into a useless pursuit like that? Why would he want to shuck off the dehumanizing-in-a-way-I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on, but also safe and reliable tradition of becoming a masseur? Did he want to starve?

Zheyuan left the school that same year.

Amidst a firestorm of dream-shattering good intentions, Zheyuan's father was a pillar of support. When others told him to be realistic, it was his father who read Zheyuan's sheet music aloud, and told him to do something he loved. Zheyuan, with his father's help, woke up routinely at 7:00 AM and practiced for ten hours each day.

It's touching, but realistically, it should have been insufficient. When your friends, family, teachers, and caretakers are all telling you that your dream is not of the "come true" variety, but of the "pipe" variety, and when that assessment is bolstered and supported by an unfair and undeserved truth, namely that you are different than others, and less capable than others, and unable to do the basic things that others take for granted ( others, they might add, who have failed to achieve the very same dream you've identified), the support of one person, sadly, should not be enough to align your inner compass. It's in this understanding that we move closer to the true nature of Zheyuan's greatness.

Let's condense the remainder of Zheyuan's blow-by-blow history. He called up the China Disabled Person's Performing Arts Troupe and played his violin on the phone. He was invited to join the elite troupe, and spent the next two years touring the world. He played at the Lincoln Center, placed in a national TV competition, and captivated audiences with a solo performance at the Asia Paralympic Games.

After two years though, uncertainty started to creep in. Zheyuan was undeniably good for a blind man - the best in the world. But Zheyuan wanted to be more than that.

Much to the dismay of his family and friends, who felt that against all odds, he had already achieved his fantastic impossible goal, he went back to school.

The Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing told him they would love to accept him, but unfortunately, didn't have the facilities required to educate blind students. Zheyuan only heard the first part of that sentence, renting out a small basement near the university and auditing all the classes there.

American schools were stunned by his playing, but turned him away for his poor English. Zheyuan started studying, memorizing a comprehensive English textbook word for word - using the text-reading app on his phone, it was the only method available to him. Clearly, this is a man who doesn't give a damn if you think he's already reached his zenith. He has further zeniths in mind, and who are you to tell him otherwise? You probably don't even play the violin.

That was six years ago. The day that we wrapped on shooting this documentary film, September 20th, 2019, Zheyuan set off on the next leg of his march down an unending and personally-bricked road: a scholarship at the University of Sheffield in England. Goodness knows where he'll go next.

When it comes to being blind, we tend to feel like it's quite self-explanatory. The absence of vision. Wouldn't that be something?

In five days of intensive, 9-to-5 shoots with Zheyuan, we learned that blindness is far more complex, and far less one dimensional than that. It's not the absence of vision, full stop. It's the absence of vision as it relates to one's physical safety, and the absence of vision as it relates to one's social life, relates to one's relationships, relates to one's concept of self. Blindness is not a singular and major affliction that blankets Zheyuan's life, but a complex and ever-moving truth that changes every aspect of his lived experience, in ways big, small, and diverse.

Shooting one of our RADII Voices films requires a significant commitment from the subject, and most of the time they're not very familiar with the filmmaking process. Zheyuan, more than anyone, displayed an immeasurable readiness and tolerance for the (often grueling) demands of the shoot.

When the crew was collapsing onto park benches, shoulders sagging with fatigue, Zheyuan was ready for the next shot. When we were scrambling madly to reach our location while the light was perfect, Zheyuan was at the front of the mob. Not once did he question anything or betray a hint of frustration. He was here to make a film, and he brought to that task the same steely resolve he brings with him everywhere.

Interestingly, from the outset, Zheyuan was preoccupied with the visual nature of our project. He wanted to know the shooting style and the visual motifs we had in mind. We sent him references, which he poured over with the help of his dad. When we created a flier for our live music event in Shanghai (Zheyuan improvising with experimental electronic musician Laughing Ears), he sent us back revisions to improve our graphic design.

Zheyuan moves around with a kind of deftness. He bumps into something every now and again, but has an uncanny ability to catch himself that could only come from a lifetime of practice (it's worth noting that we worked as a team exclusively in environments that were unfamiliar to him). Somewhere like his home or his school, his disability could very well go unnoticed. He can navigate through rooms based on a totally alternate set of sensory skills - he can tell if the walls are metal, and at which point they change to wood, based on the reverberations of spoken voices in the room. Once he's been in a place for a few minutes, he's already drawn up a memory map of each object and corner.

That kind of "alternate sensory skill" extends to his specially-designed smartphone, which uses a computer narrator to orate texts, emails, web browsing, etc. It does so at approximately 300 million words per minute, sentences and whole paragraphs whizzing by in a wild gaussian blur. The Mandarin was unintelligible to our Chinese crew members, and when he switched the device to English, I too was stumped. Zheyuan found it amusing - English was his second language, after all, and here he was scoring higher than me on listening comprehension. He had trained to do this.

In between shots, we'd return periodically to Zheyuan's hotel room for meals or power naps. The hotel was a nice one, with wall-to-wall windows and plenty of natural light. Good feng shui. The only thing that stood out was that some birdbrained interior designer had taken it upon themselves to construct the bathroom's doors and walls out of perfectly clear glass. Using the restroom, there was an unspoken rule that all would avert their eyes from the glass cube of public shame.

It wasn't until the fourth day, when we returned to the room with a full crew of additional day-rate cameramen, that one of them cracked a joke about the room's obvious design flaw.

Zheyuan turned and asked me in English, "The bathroom is made of glass?"

I told him it was. He laughed it off and said something about how silly it was. But I knew that he was having to come to terms, in one instant, with the sudden realization of public awkwardness we'd been enduring all week. Blindness is more than a physical inconvenience - it's an exclusion from a communal experience that is enjoyed ungratefully by nearly all living creatures.

When we'd wrapped the last scene on day five, we felt that euphoric sense of bliss and relief that comes with crossing any finish line. Zheyuan was beaming. We went straight to a bar to celebrate with beer and chicken wings.

Zheyuan is able to sense the social cues of conversation based on things like the tightened roundness of words spoken with a smile, or the direction someone is facing when telling a story, and the resulting way their voice projects through space. He knows when you're trying to shake his hand, or when you want to help him with his bags. Sharing a communal basket of chicken wings in the center of the table can be a little tricky, but is overall very manageable.

At one point, I asked him if he could sign the vinyl record we'd used in the film, as a memento of our time together.

"Sign it?" he said. "I can only sign it in braille!"

I'd put my foot in my mouth. Even the simple pleasure of autographing something for a fan (which by now, I had become), writing one's own name, was outside of Zheyuan's experience.

But when he'd said that, he'd done it with a sincere smile, laughing about it. This is classic Zheyuan.

The amazing thing about Zheyuan is not that he has mastered the violin. The amazing thing about Zheyuan is that, saddled with a challenge more immense than most people have ever known, he holds himself like someone who is completely unbothered in every moment. More than unbothered, but grateful.

Through one week of intense shooting, outside of his element, being prodded and shuttled around a foreign city by a crew of near-strangers, Zheyuan complained zero times. The only thing he brought forward was productive energy and assurance, even at times when we had little of our own. When he ran out of that, he slept.

It occurred to me that it was this attunement to a greater understanding, and a certainty about one's place in this world, that allows Zheyuan to do what he does. In spite of his challenges, Zheyuan has mastered his outlook on life, and he has mastered himself, in an almost nirvanic, Buddhist kind of way.

Zheyuan is not amazing because he has mastered the violin. He is amazing because he has mastered Zheyuan. His music is an expression of that - a symptom of the greater "illness" of freedom and conviction in one's own inner truth. We hope you enjoy Zheyuan's story as much as we enjoyed telling it with him.

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How a Blind Man Mastered an "Impossible" Violin Piece

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27-year-old Zhang Zheyuan is prolific. As a violinist, he's toured with elite performance troupes, traveled the world, and played in Olympic ceremonies. And he's done it all in darkness. Zheyuan was born with congenital blindness in southwest China's Yunnan province.

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Here we have a very blurred section. Many 'projects' could easily be placed into the comprehensive section and vice-versa. Many of them actually overlap into the categories of comprehensive and immersive. So why make a separate section here? Well it's just that we want to make sure our students know that they can take a feature story approach to their journalism assignments or a more project based approach.

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American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

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This is an intersection that seems common and effective to me (Sharron). I'm thinking full screen (often cinematic) experiences that work well on mobile and desktop. Often navigated with swipe, click or scroll through visuals with minimal well placed chunks of text moving the story forward and adding context. These stories have a singular linear narrative with a beginning, middle and end.

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An Unprecedented Look at a Young Woman's Face Transplant

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Are we our faces? This poignant story explores that question.

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Presents an in-depth environment that contains multiple separate elements of a story under a common umbrella, like a topic page. There is no sharp focus or single narrative that drives the users through a singular experience, the story is broken up into sections. The sections could be designed to direct the audience to consume them in a linear form or sections could be non-linear with the audience deciding how to navigate through. A story package may include segments such as profiles, background information, history, or future implications—some of which can be individually narrative.

Each segment is unique, and in many cases each section is told in the type of media most appropriate for the content in that segment. For example, a video is used for a segment of a story in which there is a lot of action or emotion, and graphics for a section that is informational or requires visual aids to explain complex subject matter.

These are questions used to qualify a story’s level of comprehensiveness:

1. This project is more about covering a topic than a single narrative story.

2. This project is divided into sections or parts, intending for the user to jump around.

3. This project is informational in nature.

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Explore the mind-boggling moons of our solar system

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Soar through a cosmic menagerie of moons-and learn their long-held secrets-in our interactive atlas.

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Melton in Leicestershire is at the bottom of a list of places to live if you're under 26, BBC analysis suggests.

Variables considered include access to mental health care, average rent prices and levels of unemployment.

The list ranks 378 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland from highest to lowest. Comparative data for Northern Ireland wasn't available.

Islington in London came top of the rankings, which are part of Radio 1 Newsbeat's Know Your Place project.

Click here if you cannot see the interactive map. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2018.

Know Your Place lets you check how your local area performs in 11 different categories.

The data, which was selected by BBC News, also looks at the number of bars, pubs, clubs and music events in each local authority, as well as access to sports facilities and 4G.

The project also carried out a poll of more than 1,000 young people to help ensure that the measures used are important to them.

A second interactive tool lets you choose which categories are more important to you and shows three areas which perform well in those categories.

Ellie Hadley has lived in Melton for most of her life.

"When I was younger I didn't really like it because there wasn't all that much but now I'm older, if you want to go for a coffee or go for lunch then it's fine," she says.

"I think the town's pretty, there's loads of parks. I would like to see more cocktail bars and nice places to eat that do different kinds of food. We've got about ten Italian places."

The 22-year-old says she would also like to see more child-friendly groups and play areas for her four-month-old daughter.

The proportion of 16-25-year-olds in each area has also been looked at.

West Dorset - an area which includes Bridport, Dorchester and Lyme Regis and has an estimated population of 100,000 - has the lowest proportion of under-26s in any local authority.

Oxford has the highest number of young people as a proportion of its population.

You can also look at which areas perform well in the categories you're interested in.

Giving each category a star rating will show the top three areas suitable for you based on your preferences.

Esme Wardle, who's a home carer from Bridport tells Newsbeat: "There are carer jobs because so many people come to retire here.

"West Dorset is quite boring. It's nice that I know everyone but if I want to go for a proper night out as an 18-year-old, I have to travel for more than an hour to actually be able to stay up past 1am.

"I've seen a few documentaries on stuff where it shows people living in cities and they meet up with their friends and they can just go out," Esme adds.

"When I was growing up, if I wanted to meet up with one of my friends then our parents had to drive us to each other's houses, then we'd have to wait there and be picked up because there's no way you could walk it."

While rent prices are relatively high in the City of Bristol, it has the highest rate of inward youth migration in Britain - meaning it has the most young people moving there compared to leaving.

"Every corner that you go to has history about it, has some sort of culture about it, and has something unique," 25-year-old photographer and youth worker Sham Ahmed told Newsbeat.

A proud Bristolian born and bred, he added: "It's just so mixed when it comes to culture."

UK Youth, a charity which supports young people, told Newsbeat: "UK Youth strongly believes that young people should be empowered to build bright futures, regardless of their background or circumstances and we are committed to providing access to appropriate, high quality services in every community."

Reporting by Daniel Rosney and Imran Rahman-Jones. Data research and analysis by Maryam Ahmed, Will Dahlgreen and Ransome Mpini. Development by Scott Jarvis and Becky Rush. Design by Irene de la Torre Arenas.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 every weekday on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra - if you miss us you can listen back here.

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Where to live if you're young: Local areas ranked for under-26s

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Melton in Leicestershire is at the bottom of a list of places to live if you're under 26, BBC analysis suggests. Variables considered include access to mental health care, average rent prices and levels of unemployment. The list ranks 378 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland from highest to lowest.

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Explore perspectives.
Select three to see a custom video.

Start your own conversation

Add a question or use one of the submitted questions to start a conversation with your social network. (Note: The n-word has not been filtered from submissions.)

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n-word; donte stallworth; neal brennan; dave chappelle show; nfl; national football leagues bans nword; nfl bans the nword; nigger; nigga; nigger vs nigga; kkk; ku klux klan; jay z; oprah;

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The n-word: An interactive project exploring a singular word

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After the National Football League made the controversial decision to ban the n-word on the field this year, a team of Washington Post journalists explored the history of the word, its evolution and its place in American vernacular today.

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Geeta Anand was a South Asia correspondent for The New York Times based in Mumbai. Vikram Singh is a video journalist based in New Delhi.

Produced by Andrew Rossback, Margaret Cheatham Williams, Alexandra Garcia and Josh Keller

Additional production by Meg Felling. Color by Ben Laffin. Map by Jeremy White. Translations by Prashanth Murali and Mahalakshmi Suresh

Note: Map highlights regions where at least 30 suicides in 2013 were attributed to climate change.

Correction: An earlier version of this article included an incomplete translation of comments by S. Kumar. The incorrect quotation has been removed.

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Geeta Anand was a South Asia correspondent for The New York Times based in Mumbai. Vikram Singh is a video journalist based in New Delhi. Produced by Andrew Rossback, Margaret Cheatham Williams, Alexandra Garcia and Josh Keller Additional production by Meg Felling. Color by Ben Laffin. Map by Jeremy White.

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Intersections include any number of project that comprise two or more qualities from our classifications system. A continuous-immersive for example, or a comprehensive-immersive.

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18 Questions. 21 Candidates. Here's What They Said.

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We asked 21 Democratic candidates the same 18 questions. Watch their answers.

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This is an interactive documentary that sits on the intersections of immersive and comprehensive.

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Explore an island threatened by climate change through the eyes of three children who call it home. FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project present "The Last Generation."

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Photo: Amanda Demme

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women's movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when a Philadelphia magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: "He gets on TV, 'Pull your pants up, black people ... I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches ... I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. Dude's image, for the most part, it's fucking public Teflon image. I've done this bit onstage and people think I'm making it up ... That shit is upsetting." The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby's reputation.

Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn't that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand's case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.

In Cosby's deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. "I used them," he said, "the same as a person would say, 'Have a drink.' " He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and "financially not doing well." In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, "I think that I'm a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things." If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).

Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public's memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn't. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women's accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been "misinterpreted"). People ran a piece in which some of the Jane Does told their stories under their own names, bolstering Constand's account, but Cosby's career rolled on. In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.

The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study - both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the '60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn't register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby's accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the '70s and '80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and "No Means No" helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that's been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape - like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family's house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?

This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby's accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.

Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby's perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who'd come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Postabout her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman's op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple's board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told " Page Six" that he wanted "the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind." (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn't been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he'd raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: "Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby." Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: "If you give a woman - or a man, for that matter - without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that's rape."

There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who've chosen to remain silent.

×

Name: Tamara Green

Occupation: attorney

Alleged Assault: early 1970s

Green met Cosby through a mutual friend in Los Angeles. Cosby asked Green, an aspiring singer and model at the time, to help him raise money for a new club the comedian wanted to open. One day, Green didn't feel well, and she phoned Cosby to tell him she couldn't help him. Cosby convinced her to grab lunch at Café Figaro, telling Green she'd feel better after she ate. At the restaurant, he offered Green red and gray pills. He told her that they were over-the-counter cold medicine. Green swallowed the pills. Soon after, she began to feel dizzy, and the two left the restaurant together. Cosby drove Green to her apartment where he undressed himself and began to undress her. He began rubbing her body. He masturbated while assaulting her through digital penetration. Green struggled, saying repeatedly, "You're going to have to kill me." Cosby put two $100 bills on the coffee table before he left Green's apartment. Green came forward in 2005, and signed onto Andrea Constand's lawsuit, not as a Jane Doe, but in her own name. She was the second woman to publicly come forward. "From the first day until this day, I have told everyone who would sit still long enough. If it comes up at all - last year, I sold a truck to a fella, and I remember sitting in the cab of the truck telling the story, and him looking at me like I had two heads."

" Back to Article

This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. "I'm no longer afraid," said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. "I feel more powerful than him."

Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival - the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number - discovering that they hadn't been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn't need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country - ten different states are represented - and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other's stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, "a sorrowful sisterhood." ■

The Incidents

"My agent said we've been contacted by a really, really big person in the entertainment industry who's interested in mentoring promising young talent. I find out it's Bill Cosby. I had the understanding I was going to be receiving private acting coaching from him. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. A driver would pick me up, my agent was paying for it. That made it all very, very professional. The door opens, and there stands Cosby. He's in his sweats and very casual, very friendly. I had a monologue prepared. He seemed unimpressed. He said, 'Let's try a cold read,' so he pulls out a script. The scene was set in a bar; the character was someone who was inebriated. He poured a glass of white wine. And he said, use this as a prop - now, that means you're going to have to sip on it, of course. I really don't remember much, except waking up in his bedroom. He was naked, and he was forcing himself into my mouth." -Heidi Thomas

"I was introduced to Bill Cosby through my modeling agent. She said that Cosby wanted to see me. Which I thought was obviously for the show. I was told there was going to be a dinner, and when I got there, no one ever arrived. He asked me if I wanted a glass of wine; I took a few sips. It had a horrible taste. And I started not feeling well. He helped me up by my underarms with both hands. He walked me into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall, and he told me to look at myself. Something was wrong with me. And then he took my right hand, and he put it behind my back. I remember seeing semen on the floor. And I felt some liquid on my hand. That was when I knew something sexual was going on." -Jewel Allison

"He took my roommate and me out to dinner. It was this new hip steak restaurant on the strip near the Whiskey a Go Go called Sneaky Pete's. He was chatting her up and trying to charm her. And he reached across and put a pill next to my wineglass and said, 'Here, this will make you feel better,' and he gave her one. I wasn't really thinking. My son had recently died. I thought, Great, me feel better? You bet. So I took the pill and washed it down with some red wine. And then he reached across and put another pill in my mouth and gave her one. Just after I took the second pill, my face was, like, face-in-plate syndrome, and I just said, 'I wanna go home.' He said he would drive us home. We went up this elevator. I sat down, and lay my head back, just fighting nausea. I looked around and he was sitting next to my roommate on the love seat with this very predatory look on his face. She was completely unconscious. I could hear the words in my head, but I couldn't form words with my mouth, because I was so drugged out. He got up and came over, and he sat down and unzipped his fly. He had me give him oral sex, and then he stood me up, turned me over, did me doggy style, and walked out. Just as he got to the door, I said, 'How do we get out of here, how do we get home?' And he said, 'Call a cab.' " -Victoria Valentino

×

Name: Carla Ferrigno

Occupation: former Playboy bunny

Alleged Assault: 1967

Ferrigno met a man at Los Angeles International Airport who asked her out to dinner. She went, and before the date was over, the man mentioned that he and Cosby were good friends. He asked Ferrigno if she wanted to go to Cosby's house with him that night. She drove with her date to Cosby's Beverly Hills home, where she met the comedian and his wife, Camille. They went to a movie, Cosby sitting next to her. After the movie, the group went back to Cosby's house to play pool. Cosby offered Ferrigno a cocktail. She refused it. They continued their pool game, but soon Ferrigno realized that Camille had left the room. Ferrigno's date disappeared next, just as they finished up their game. She asked Cosby where the man had gone. He brushed off her question. Ferrigno went to put the cue back when Cosby rushed her. He gripped her and kissed her. Ferrigno sprinted out of the room. "I never spoke to anyone again about this," she says. She opened up about the incident publicly in November 2014.

"In 2005, I heard on the radio a woman who was crying and talking about how she was molested by Bill Cosby. I listened to it. That was when I said to myself, 'This was a setup. This is a setup.' I never thought of this before. That guy must have been like a pimp for him."

" Back to Article

"Bill had been a friend. I had had dinner with his wife on one or two different occasions, I had worked with him, I had known him for many, many years, and he never made a pass at me. So when this happened to me, I was really, really shocked. I just couldn't understand what was wrong with him. Had he lost his mind? When I came out of the bathroom, he said to me, 'Okay, come on, let's go. They're waiting for us.' He was behaving like a person that I had never met before in my life." -Kathy McKee

"At 17, my agent introduced me to Bill Cosby, who was going to mentor me and take me to the next level of my career. Over the course of the next year, I was drugged half the time when I was with him and would come out of a delusional experience going, 'Whoa, what was that?' He would say, 'Well, I needed to undress you and wash your clothes because you got drunk and made a fool of yourself.' Do you remember the Jaycee Dugard story? She pretty much could have climbed over the fence any time she wanted to but was just so broken down and couldn't think straight. I felt like a prisoner; I felt I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight. I could have walked down any street of Manhattan at any time and said, 'I'm being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,' but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody. I was invited down to Atlantic City to see his show and had a very confusing night where I was completely drugged and my luggage was missing. When I called the concierge to find out where my luggage was, Cosby went ballistic. He slammed the phone down and said, 'What the hell are you doing, letting the whole hotel know I have a 19-year-old girl in my hotel suite?' The next morning, he summoned me down to his room and yelled at me that I needed to have discretion. He threw me down on the bed and he put his forearm under my throat. He straddled me, and he took his belt buckle off. The clanking of the belt buckle, I'll never forget." -Barbara Bowman

"I had a terrible headache, and I said, 'Bill, do you have some Tylenol? I have a mother of a headache.' And he said to me, 'I have something stronger.' And I said, 'You know I don't do drugs.' He said, 'You're one of my best friends. Would I hurt you?' And I believed him. All I remember is taking the pill; I don't remember going to bed. But I do remember waking up in a fog and opening my eyes, and I had no clothes on, and there was Bill's friend totally naked in bed with me. He started to laugh and smile, and he said, 'Oh, did you have a good time?' I said, 'What the fuck happened? Do you always eff a dead person?' I got my clothes on and I walked out. And Bill said, 'Where are you going?' I said, 'What the eff did you give me?' He said, 'Oh, you had a bad headache, you were in so much pain. I gave you a Quaalude.' I was hurt with Bill more than angry at his friend. Bill let him take advantage of me. That kills me. That's why I know the stories of what he did to the other women are true, because if he didn't have the respect for me, who was really a close friend, then he could do that to anybody he didn't know very well." -Joyce Emmons

×

Name: "Kacey"

Occupation: project manager

Alleged Assault: 1996

Kacey worked for Cosby's personal-appearance agent at William Morris. Her professional relationship with the comedian became friendlier over time - he would check in about her life, her family, her future. Cosby eventually approached Kacey to say that he wanted to work with her on a new television show that was in development. He invited Kacey to dinner and insisted she read through a scene that ended in a kiss. They parted awkwardly, but later she agreed to meet him at his bungalow at the Bel Air Hotel for lunch. Cosby opened the door in a robe and slippers. During lunch, he pestered her, saying she needed to relax, and tried to hand her a large white pill. Kacey repeated that she was fine, but Cosby persisted. When she came to, she was in bed, Cosby next to her.

"I really felt for all those years that it was just me, that I was alone. With all of the other women coming forward, it just really felt - this is the right time. It's okay. I can step out of this door that I've been trapped behind."

" Back to Article

The Aftermath

"I told my supervisor at the Playboy Club what he did to me, and you know what she said to me? She said: 'You do know that that's Hefner's best friend, right?' I said, 'Yes.' She says to me: 'Nobody's going to believe you. I suggest you shut your mouth.' " -PJ Masten

"People often these days say, 'Well, why didn't you take it to the police?' Andrea Constand went to the police in 2005 - how'd it work out for her? Not at all. In 2005, Bill Cosby still had control of the media. In 2015, we have social media. We can't be disappeared. It's online and can never go away." -Tamara Green

"I had a few moments where I tried to come forward. But I was just too scared, and I also had the extra burden of not really wanting to take an African-American man down." -Jewel Allison

"I didn't realize that I had been raped. Back then, rape was done in an alleyway with somebody holding a knife to your throat that you didn't know. There was no date rape back then. I just knew that something horrible had happened. But I couldn't put a name to it. The difference between this and that rape in the dark alley is that his face would be before me every week on TV. People would mention a joke that he said: 'Wasn't that funny?' And all the while, my stomach would just be churning." -Joan Tarshis

"In 1975, it wasn't an issue that was even discussed. Rape was being beaten up in a park. I understood at the time that it was wrong, but I just internalized it and dealt with it and pushed it down, and it resided in a very private place. It affects your trust with other people." - Marcella Tate

"Survivors of rape have a very difficult time having intimate relationships. I was in my 20s. I could never have a real relationship. It was like a black, disgusting tumor-a secret tumor." - PJ Masten

" When I see a Jell-O pudding, it comes flooding back. Bill Cosby, that encounter, that one time, played a major factor in the direction my life took, toward the dark side." -Sammie Mays

"Eighteen is very young. It took me a long, long time to come to terms with the fact that it was him, it wasn't me. Life has not been easy for me. I had addiction problems as I got older." -Linda Joy Traitz

"People go, 'Why haven't you gotten over it?' But you might as well ask a combat soldier why he doesn't forget the Battle of Guadalcanal. There was someone trying to harm him, someone trying to kill him, and they never get over it, they just learn how to cope with it." -Tamara Green

×

Name: Lili Bernard

Occupation: artist and actor

Alleged Assault: early 1990s

Cosby started mentoring Bernard before she guest-starred on The Cosby Show in the early 1990s. "I looked upon him as a father figure," she says. "He often said to me, 'You're one of my kids, Bernard.'" Later, Cosby drugged her drink, and raped her. During their last contact, on The Cosby Show set in 1992, he told her, "As far as I'm concerned, Bernard, you're dead. Do you hear me? You're dead. You don't exist." Afterward, she became suicidal. She came forward in May 2015. "For the last 23-plus years I've been living with a tremendous sense of fear. Being able to relinquish that fear was freeing for me, and the only reason I was able to do that was so many other women had done it before me, and I felt safe."

" Back to Article

The Avalanche

"I read Barbara Bowman's piece in the Washington Post, how no one believed her, and I said, 'This is it. I have to say something now. I have to stand up and say, Yes. Somebody else does believe you, because it happened to me.' It was sort of like we were yodeling in a canyon and set off an avalanche. I knew I wasn't ever gonna receive any money. I certainly didn't want to be remembered as the woman that Bill Cosby raped. But I just felt so vindicated that I wasn't alone." -Joan Tarshis

"How would it benefit any of us? It doesn't. We're telling the story because we can't hold it inside anymore." - Kathy McKee

"I came forward to offer my support as a witness. I knew my statute of limitations had run out. When only one or two women came out, a couple of years ago, they were ridiculed more. It's hard to not believe the numbers now." - Janice Baker-Kinney

×

Name: Barbara Bowman

Age: 48

Occupation: artist; ambassador with PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment)

Alleged Assault:1985 to 1987

Bowman was a 17-year-old model and an aspiring actress when her agent introduced her to Cosby in Denver in 1985. Cosby offered to mentor Bowman. The comedian flew her to celebrity events and performances across the country. He eventually moved her to New York City and then Long Island, while she took acting classes in the city. In New York, Cosby drugged and raped Bowman repeatedly; she didn't realize for two years what was happening. "There were times when I was completely confused," she says, "and there were other times that were very clear." In 2005, Bowman joined Andrea Constand's lawsuit as a supporting witness.

"It was a predatory grooming process that was very subtle and very manipulative. He was America's favorite dad. I went into this thinking he was going to be my dad. He zoned right in on my insecurities. He convinced me that he was going to take care of me like a father, that he loved me like a daughter. To wake up half-dressed and raped by the man that said he was going to love me like a father? That's pretty sick.

I was invited down to Atlantic City to see his show. It was a very confusing night where I was completely drugged and my luggage was missing. When I called the concierge to find out where my luggage was, Cosby went ballistic. He said, 'What the hell are you doing, letting the whole hotel know I have a 19-year-old girl in my hotel suite?'

The next morning, I woke up undressed. I didn't know what had happened. He called me on the phone and summoned me down to his room. He yelled at me that I had embarrassed him by being at the hotel, and that I needed to have discretion. Then he pounced on me. He threw me down on the bed and he put his forearm under my throat and started choking me. He straddled me, and he took his belt buckle off. The clanking of the belt buckle, I'll never forget. It was jammed, and he was trying to unzip his pants. I was able to wiggle out. It was like a switch went off, like somebody flicked a switch and he suddenly came to reality and realized that he was really going to make a bigger scene than I had ever made. He did not rape me. That was it. He just decided I was too much work. He wrote me off, he kicked me out. I was done. When it was all over, the words that came out of Cosby's mouth were: 'I better never, ever see your face or hear your name again.'"

" Back to Article

"I went online one morning, just to check my email. The Yahoo page came up, and there was something about Cosby, this thing with Hannibal Buress. And all of a sudden, something just hit me. Anger. Son of a bitch! You know, a woman can be not believed for 30 years. But it takes one man? To make a joke about it? That fucking pissed me off so bad. Suddenly I'm thinking, Who do I contact?" - Victoria Valentino

"I have a friend who is a detective for a police department. She's the one who pushed me to file a report. My husband was like, ' No, I don't want anybody to know, we don't want to expose you, I don't want people saying bad things.' But my friend said, 'You gotta do it for you.' " - Lise-Lotte Lublin

" I saw that there were a lot of negative responses being posted against Barbara Bowman and Joan Tarshis and Tamara Green and Andrea Constand, grouping them in a historical reference to claims that "white women" have made in the past, that weren't truthful, about being raped by a black man. But unfortunately with this case, I knew that there was a very strong possibility that these women were telling the truth, because I had had my own negative experience with Bill Cosby. And so I just felt like, No, this can't go in that direction."- Jewel Allison

"The part of it I wasn't prepared for was the onslaught of women that have been assaulted and them telling me their story because I told mine." - Beverly Johnson

"I started getting private messages on Facebook from other former Bunnies: ' He did me too, PJ. He got me too.' There's a couple of websites - 'We believe the women' - and Cosby sites that we all created. And we talk, all the survivors. We just had the photo shoot. And I said it was one of the greatest experiences I ever had. It was fun. We had great music, great food, we were all dancing and laughing, and yet in L.A., the L.A. group said it was so somber, and everybody was upset. And I said, 'What, are you kidding? We were celebrating here in New York, baby.' Our freedom, our freedom! Nothing macabre about that. We're out." - PJ Masten

×

Name: Jewel Allison

Occupation: writer

Alleged Assault: circa 1990

Cosby was in New York City filming the Cosby Show, and asked through Allison's agent to meet with her. He invited her to his New York City brownstone for dinner, but Allison was the only guest. He offered her a glass of wine. Allison took a few sips. She started to feel sick. She remembers Cosby helping her up, and seeing semen. She became nauseous and ill, and Cosby escorted her to a taxi and sent her home. "I told my closest girlfriend. That was the first person I told. I told family members. I told friends. Maybe about 10 years later or so, I ran into a former model who was with my agency and we compared notes. We started talking about him and she had an incident also, which I can't talk about because she still hasn't come forward. I told her then she should never tell anybody. I was trying to protect her.

I had a few moments where I tried to come forward. I've picked up the phone more than once over the course of two decades. This is before the women started coming forward in large numbers. But I was just too scared, and I also had the extra burden of not really wanting to take an African-American man down. I've always been very closely involved in the black community. And for me to come forward and basically destroy this very positive image of, as few as we have, of African-American men in America, it was just too difficult to do at that time. "

" Back to Article

"Listen, he was America's favorite dad. I went into this thinking he was going to be my dad. To wake up half-dressed and raped by the man that said he was going to love me like a father? That's pretty sick. It was hard for America to digest when this came out. And a lot of backlash and a lot denial and a lot of anger." - Barbara Bowman

"I think his legacy is going to be similar to O.J.'s legacy. When you hear O.  J. Simpson's name, you don't think, Oh, great football player. That doesn't come to mind first. I'm thinking it's not going to be, Oh, great comedian. It's going to be, Oh, serial rapist. And that will be our legacy." -Joan Tarshis

VIEW PORTFOLIO AS A SLIDESHOW

Additional reporting by Jen Kirby.
Correction: The article originally mischaracterized a 2006 People report on Cosby's accusers.

*This article appears in the July 27, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

VIDEOS: HAIR FOR DICKINSON BY STANTON DUKE SNYDER; MAKEUP FOR DICKINSON BY IGOR SANAEV; MAKEUP FOR FERRIGNO BY STEPHANIE KIM USING FACE ATELIER/EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT; STEPHANIE KIM USING CHARLOTTE TILLBURY AND BUMBLE AND BUMBLE/EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT (BOWMAN, BERNARD, VALENTINO).

PHOTOGRAPHS: HAIR AND MAKEUP: MIHO SUZUKI USING CHANEL AND BUMBLE AND BUMBLE/ARTISTS AT WILHELMINA (BAKER-KINNEY, BERNARD, BOWMAN, BURNS, FERRIER, GREEN, HAYES, KIRKPATRICK, LASHA, LUBLIN, MCKEE, MORITZ, SERIGNESE, SHAPIRO, STEUER, TATE, THOMAS, TRAITZ, VALENTINO, WELLES); MICHAEL JOHNSON/FACTORY DOWNTOWN (ALLISON, BROWN, BUTTERFIELD, GUMPEL, KACEY, MASTEN, MAYS, TARSHIS, THOMPSON); IGOR SANAEV (DICKINSON); KARMISHA LITTLE (JOHNSON); STEPHANIE KIM USING CHARLOTTE TILLBURY AND BUMBLE AND BUMBLE/EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT (BOWMAN); STEPHANIE KIM USING FACE ATELIER/EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT (FERRIGNO). PRODUCTION: SOFIA DE GUZMAN AND STEPHANIE WESTCOTT.

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'I'm No Longer Afraid': 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn't Listen

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More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women's movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when a Philadelphia magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: "He gets on TV, 'Pull your pants up, black people ...

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Stories in the Immersive category create an environment, a space for the user to explore, and through which the narrative unfolds. It’s an environment that is very engaging, and there is an high level of interactivity. Interactive documentaries would also fit in this category.

Can be linear or non-linear The level of control the user had in directing the experience varies in these projects. Some Immersive news packages are even like video games or choose-your-own-adventure stories, where users made choices that would determine their own experience. The experience varied from user to user based on the decisions made. Others packages were a very structured experiences with little more than a “next” button to advance the narrative through a unified path.

“Cinematic” is a term often associated with this category, and it makes sense. A striking commonality found in these projects was that most had some sort of initial start page displayed up front with a title, background information, and more importantly a button or link requesting action to initiate the experience.

1. These stories create an experience requiring lots of interactivity and often take up the full screen of the browser.

2. This project begins with some type of launch-like element, like a play button, to initiate the experience.

3. This project uses audiovisual media to create an immersive environment.

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In Afghanistan, men do most of the talking. So we went to a school and talked to kids. We met girls and boys who have big dreams. But is their country ready for them?

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Multimedia News Storytelling - A Visual Learning Tool

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We seek to understand the best practices of multimedia storytelling by analyzing the most recent (2010-2013) news packages that are given award by ONA (Online News Association) and AEJMC (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass communication), since they represent the best work of professional news organizations and journalism schools in the United States.

# data[].attributes.body
Nonlinear means that rather than reading a rigidly structured single narrative, the user chooses how to navigate through the elements of a story. Needs to be a very careful choice, very often non-linear projects are simply confusing. Can your audience really navigate in any journey and still gain value?

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A 12-point checklist to help with planning your first multimedia storyBy Shorthand 

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A 12-point checklist to help with planning your first multimedia storyBy Shorthand 

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There are lots of things to consider when planning a multimedia story, from the structure it will take and the media to include, to the overall experience you're wanting to create.

A multimedia story that is well planned and prepared results in a better experience that drives the reader through the narrative.

So, before you set off on your next storytelling adventure, we hope the checklist below will help bring all of these factors together, and ensure your final story has a great structure, engaging flow and use of media that will truly bring the story alive...

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A 12-point checklist to help with planning your first multimedia story

By Shorthand
17th November 2017

We know there are lots of things to consider when planning a multimedia story, from the structure it will take and the media to include, to the overall experience you're wanting to create.

A multimedia story that is well planned and prepared results in a better experience that drives the reader through the narrative.

So, before you set off on your next storytelling adventure, we hope the checklist below will help bring all of these factors together, and ensure your final story has a great structure, engaging flow and use of media that will truly bring the story alive...

4. Decide who's involved

With your chosen treatments in mind, consider what skillsets you need to bring to the table.
What about a video producer? Or a designer to help create visuals?

Make sure they are familiar with yourstoryboard, the treatment in use throughout and, if you're using any third-party tools, an understanding of the available features.

5. Set a timetable

Start from when you need to go live with
your story and set out mini goals.

Include, where possible, a few days'
grace between finishing andpublishing,
and time to get feedback
from all necessary channels.

Also ensure the timeline includes
testing across multiple devices.

6. Capture your media

When gathering media for your story, bear in mind how visuals could help add to, or even drive, the narrative.

7. Optimize your media

Optimizing your media for viewing across different devices is vital. That includes the crop, size and weight of the file.

For example, over 50% of traffic to all Shorthand stories comes from mobile, so don't leave it as an afterthought. In fact, we wrote another Craft post on just that recently.Read it here.

Also,optimize before you upload - it can be all too easy to forget later on!

11. Know your audience

Test and check the story on the devices you know will be the most important to your audience (revisit your analytics to check what those are).

Also, think about the accessibility of your story. For example, how will those who are visually impaired experience your narrative? We recently did a deep dive on accessibility for visual storytelling.Read it here.

We hope you've found this 12-point checklist useful. If you'd like to print out a version to keep, please see our support document on this.
This is an updated version of a Craft post originally published in June 2016.

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Checklist for planning a multimedia story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 12-point checklist to help with planning your first multimedia story By Shorthand 17th November 2017 We know there are lots of things to consider when planning a multimedia story, from the structure it will take and the media to include, to the overall experience you're wanting to create.

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We often get asked what not to do when it comes to storytelling. So, in this post we tackle seven deadly storytelling 'sins' and how not to fall foul of them when using Shorthand

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Puerto Rico's apagón, or "super blackout," is the longest and largest major power outage in modern U.S. history. Without electricity, there is no reliable source of clean water. School is out, indefinitely. Health care is fraught. Small businesses are faltering. The tasks of daily life are both exhausting and dangerous. There is nothing to do but wait, and no one can say when the lights will come back on. Lee este artículo en español.

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RAFAEL SURILLO Mayor of Yabucoa

You can mark our history as pre-Maria and post-Maria.

[Hurricane Maria] came to either straighten Puerto Rico out or make it anew.

The little we had, we lost.

I feel abandoned by the state.

Basically the world changed. Everything changed.

Stability won't get here until the power is back.

Without power, life is very hard.
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Two powerful hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico in September. They created a humanitarian crisis for the island's 3.4 million U.S. citizens that has persisted for three months. Power restoration is at a crawl because the grid collapsed, the utility is bankrupt and the logistics are daunting: Crews and supplies have to come from the mainland, then make their way into rugged interior areas like Utuado. Many roads remain impassable, and hundreds are still isolated.

Two powerful hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico in September. They created a humanitarian crisis for the island's 3.4 million U.S. citizens that has persisted for three months. Power restoration is at a crawl because the grid collapsed, the utility is bankrupt and the logistics are daunting: Crews and supplies have to come from the mainland, then make their way into rugged interior areas like Utuado. Many roads remain impassable, and hundreds are still isolated.

The deluge of rain created mudslides that toppled transmission lines, broke water pipes and pushed homes down hills. The family that lived in this house escaped just in time. The green lushness has returned to the mountains, though it is broken by huge gashes of mud.
Reconstruction of the scene
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Afraid that the slope supporting her house would collapse into the lake below, Maria Ortiz Viruet moved two doors away, to her mother's house. She is a veteran public school teacher who has weathered storms of all kinds. But nothing prepared her for this darkness.

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Maria Ortiz Viruet

Maria left me with nothing.

We are not getting basic services like water or electricity.

My daily routine has been affected.

To get the coffee ready we have to use the water that we're given, the potable bottled water.

I have to go to the mountain spring to find water, with a bucket to be able to take a bath,

carry the water to wash the dishes, the plates and the silverware.

It's hard.

Like most teachers across the island, Maria reports to work each day at an empty school.

Like most teachers across the island, Maria reports to work each day at an empty school.

No power and no water means no school for many of the territory's more than 1,000 schools - and total disruption to the lives of tens of thousands of children. They have lost their daily routine of classes, friends and meals.

Most have not been to school at all this fall. With each passing day, educators realize they are waiting for students who may never come back.

Maria can't get used to the emptiness.

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Maria Ortiz Viruet

I studied here from first grade until ninth grade.

That is why I love my school,

I love my community.

It feels really sad

to get to the classroom every day.

The children's smiles are missing.

We teachers are going to school because the instructions that were given to us

at first were to fix the school, remove debris, clean the rooms

to have the school in optimal condition.

And we're waiting as well for the team of engineers to come and certify that the school

is ready to receive the children.

They will be gravely affected if we don't act immediately.

Instead of classwork, children get lessons in catching mountain water to do the wash. On the mainland, school districts in Florida, Texas, New York and New England have absorbed thousands of students who don't want to fall behind. But those who stayed - including Maria's son, Jesús, 18 - are about to lose an entire semester.

But those who remain - including Maria's son, Jesús, who is 18 - don't know what will happen next.

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Jesús Manuel Mejía Ortiz

I really need my school. It's my last year. I believe that high school is important.

People have told me many times to enjoy high school. How am I going to enjoy it like this after this disaster?

There is one more thing to learn, and I will finally know

all the basics of welding. And I will have my diploma.

It is my last year, and I don't know what's going to happen.

What he does know: Nearly every day, the generator needs some kind of fix. When it breaks down, out come the candles and flashlights.

The buzzing of fuel-powered generators is inescapable. Their din is the new background noise of the night, the motors roaring to life all across the island at dusk.

Expensive to buy and fill, smelly and dangerous, the machines were never intended to be a substitute for public electricity.

A household can limp along on a generator, but it has been perilous for Puerto Rico's elderly and infirm to rely on the machines for months on end.

Many of them need power just to breathe. Since the storm, there has been a surge of deaths from pneumonia, diabetes, Alzheimer's and breathing disorders compared with the same period in 2016. The toll could rise over 1,000, some estimate.

All the advances of modern medicine are useless without electricity. How to run oxygen machines and nebulizer treatments? How to sterilize equipment and refrigerate medicine?

Thousands of the chronically sick live at home and are too poor or too frail to keep a generator filled and running. The fumes can trigger more breathing problems. It falls to family members and community health workers to improvise and soldier on.

Aixa Jiménez, a home hospice nurse, spends more time caring for her patients, including Margarita, 94, who has Alzheimer's disease. Helping Margarita live with dignity and keeping her clean and comfortable are more complicated since the hurricane hit.

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Teresa Irizarry

The nurse, Aixa,

She's a beautiful human being.

We've learned a lot from her.

She's helped us a lot taking care of Mom.

Aixa Jiménez Nurse, San Lucas Home Hospice We faced a challenge with her because she uses oxygen continuously.

It was difficult to provide therapy, change the bed position, and to lift her up.

She has to come up with new therapies on the spot. Héctor Pérez, who has a lung disease and shouldn't get overheated, no longer has working air conditioning.

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Hector Perez Hospice Patient

We don't have water yet.

I was in the Marine Corps. I spent five years and nine months in the service.

I joined when I was 17 years old and here I am. I'm still alive.

Lydia Zeda Reyes Hector's Wife After the hurricane, as you know, no one in Utuado had power or water service,

which was hard for him because he needs oxygen, and he gets overheated.

He used this hand fan to have air because we didn't have a generator or a place to install one.

The Spanish verb "to struggle" is bregar, but it means much more on this island.

When Puerto Ricans use this word, as they do constantly post-Maria, they are describing gritty determination. It's the deeply cultural will to not just survive scarcity and hardship but also to use creativity and humor to thrive within it. On busted power poles and crumbling overpasses are Puerto Rico's flag and this scrawled message: "Yo no me quito," or "I won't give up."

That spirit has propelled people to devise river crossings where bridges are washed out. Neighbors have formed brigades to clear roads with machetes and run cables from a single generator to light several homes.

But no amount of community resourcefulness can string electric line and rebuild highways. It took nearly two weeks for the territorial government and U.S. agencies to deliver relief to the hardest-hit communities. Politics and bureaucratic squabbles continue to bog down recovery.

While they wait on government, Puerto Ricans are demonstrating what they mean by bregar.

Three months after Maria, basic survival seems more like subsistence. The residents of Rio Abajo were cut off from food, water and supplies when the bridge to their rural homes collapsed. They had to get across the river.

Three months after Maria, basic survival seems more like subsistence. The residents of Rio Abajo were cut off from food, water and supplies when the bridge to their rural homes collapsed. Syndia Maria Sotomayor Torres' family invented a wood cart and pulley system to cross the river.

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The idea actually came from my son Dennis. "Daddy why don't we create a

basket and cross the river?" And we thought about it for a few days until they were able to build it

to have access to the main roads and bring food.

They call it the zip line. I don't know if that's the right name,

but when we use it we feel like we could fly.

It's the only way to get out of here, and it has been really helpful for us.

For every ingenious workaround, there are a dozen reminders of how life used to be.

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Living without electricity is hard

because we were used to living a certain way, just arriving home and turning on the lights.

And still after more than 30 days with no power, we still enter a room and automatically flip the switch, and then I say to myself, "What am I doing?"

We are trying to persevere. People have told us to leave,

but this is our home. This is not just a house, it is our home.

For Syndia and her family, the mountain life they chose now tests their endurance.
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For many Puerto Ricans who make their homes in population centers, the storm's aftermath has been equally merciless. In coastal regions like Yabucoa, the upheaval touches every facet of city life.

For many Puerto Ricans who make their homes in population centers, the storm's aftermath has been equally merciless.

In coastal regions like Yabucoa, the upheaval touches every facet of city life.

In three months, not a single light bulb in Yabucoa has been illuminated by the power grid.

In 12 weeks, not a single light bulb in Yabucoa has been illuminated by the power grid.

The baseball stadium that was the center of life in Yabucoa is now a landmark of mangled metal. The plantain fields that generated millions in revenue have been flattened.

Puerto Rico is bankrupt. A decade-long recession pushed the island to the brink of catastrophe, and Maria pushed it over. The outdated power infrastructure, run by a public utility with $9 billion in debt, collapsed. The territory has no money to restore electricity to businesses that power the economy, and with each passing day, the economy gets worse.

There are only two grocers in town stocked well enough to feed the city of 38,000. The line for the post office is dozens of people long. And the most reliable meals come from crowded fast-food restaurants and street vendors.

Several businesses are shuttered or open for a few hours a day, so pay has been cut for lots of workers, and many wonder how long they can hang on.

"The baseball park is part of our heritage as Yabucoans," said Mayor Rafael Surillo. "This sports venue is where the whole town gathers together. That place has a lot of history and in an instant, in less than 12 hours, it disappeared. That's the kind of pain we feel."
Reconstruction of the scene
"The baseball park is part of our heritage as Yabucoans," said Mayor Rafael Surillo. "This sports venue is where the whole town gathers together. That place has a lot of history and in an instant, in less than 12 hours, it disappeared. That's the kind of pain we feel."

Maria Rivera and her husband, Roberto, have sold fried snacks, including their popular alcapurrias, for decades at a food stand on Yabucoa's main strip. Seven days a week, eight hours a day, they work, and that has propelled them into the middle class. Keeping it going without power is a new challenge.

Maria Rivera and her husband, Roberto, have sold fried snacks, including their popular alcapurrias, for decades at a food stand on Yabucoa's main strip. Seven days a week, eight hours a day, they work, and that has propelled them into the middle class. Keeping it going without power is a new challenge.

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MARIA RIVERA Business owner

Look, when people come to Puerto Rico because a family member died,

their first visit is to get alcapurrias and then they go see their family.

That's just how it is.

But right now, I work for diesel and for what we are going to eat.

And with the chaos we had, we were all so exhausted,

we didn't know if we were going to be able stand on our feet.

Sometimes you go to bed and you can't sleep. You can't sleep because of all the day's work.00:36.230--> 00:40.200And the other day, my pressure rose to 200, something that's never happened to me.

The couple goes to town searching for the ingredients, paying nearly double what it cost before the storm. Add the fuel expenses for the generator that runs the commercial freezer, and the business is barely breaking even. But Maria and Roberto refuse to raise their prices.

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MARIA RIVERA Business owner

I told my husband, "Let's work until our supplies finish".

We went to work and people kept coming.

I've had my clients for 30 years.

And they're not only my clients, they're family.

They joke with us. We joke with them.

Many people say we are there to take away their stress.

I am buying small amounts of food so that I don't have a lot when the generator stops working

because all of them are failing.

Everyone that I know their generator has stopped working.

Sometimes I tell my husband that one of these days we'll leave and won't come back.

More than 472,000 homes across Puerto Rico were damaged by Hurricane Maria. Elizabeth Ortiz built this house a decade ago, hoping to one day pass it along to her children. But the tempest had other plans.
Reconstruction of the scene
Puerto Rico's emerging adults may be the most traumatized by what Maria wrecked.

For the half-million young people between the ages of 18 and 24, the powerful Category 4 hurricane was their first.

They are too young to have faced down disaster and developed the skills to survive it. And they are too old to find novelty in their reshaped landscape.

Their dreams were put abruptly on hold, and being powerless to affect what comes next, many say, is sofocante and desesperante - suffocating and exasperating.

Before Maria, 16-year-old Alondra Quiles had a plan. She would graduate high school, follow her brother to the mainland United States and join the military. After Maria, who can say? All she knows for certain is that she wants to stay by her mother's side.

It took her weeks to summon the strength to return to the damaged home where she rode out the storm's 18-hour assault, locked in the bathroom. That kind of desperation gnaws at her soul.

Her mother, Elizabeth, vows to persevere for Puerto Rico's sake. Alondra is less certain it's her fight.

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ELIZABETH ORTIZ Yabucoa resident

We are living as if it were the times of our parents or our grandparents.

To not have electricity means not having a fan, no water heater.

Basically the world changed. Everything changed.

The technological advances went back like 35 years or more.

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ALONDRA QUILES ORITZ

The day of the hurricane, in the middle of the bathroom I kept questioning God:

"Why did you send us this?

Why did you allow for us to lose everything?"

I questioned many things.

I told him I wanted to finish my senior year.

I said, "Lord, let them open the school.

Open the school because I cannot stand being cooped up in here, in this loneliness."

The storm blew out the front doors and windows, destroying everything inside their home. It broke Alondra's heart. Elizabeth salvaged what she could, but their home is not much more than a shell. They live by lantern light, washing clothes by hand, days ordered by sunlight.

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ALONDRA QUILES ORITZ

Emotionally, in losing everything, you compare your life now to what it was before.

All of that is traumatizing.

I feel immense anxiety.

It's something that builds up inside you.

It makes you want to run and run until you get tired and scream until you release everything inside.

It has been hard because we are literally alone.

But, I do not feel so bad because I have her and I feel full.

I don't need much more as long as I have my mother, a place to sleep and food to eat.

Her mother, Elizabeth, vows to persevere for Puerto Rico's sake. Alondra is less certain it's her fight.

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ELIZABETH ORTIZ Yabucoa resident

When will the power come back in Yabucoa? I wish it was today.

But I am not leaving my island.

Maybe rich people left, because they are not used to this.

But those of us who are poor, who have seen this before and who were hit hard.

We want to fight, to lift up our country.

We do not run.

Being powerless in Puerto Rico means that each day of the past three months is just like the day before, a way of life unimaginable in any state on the mainland. Hook up the generator, boil water and hold fast. It could take months until the power comes back on. Until then, millions are in limbo.

Being powerless in Puerto Rico means that each day of the past three months is just like the day before, a way of life unimaginable in any state on the mainland. Hook up the generator, boil water and hold fast. It could take months until the power comes back on. Until then, millions are in limbo.

Credits

Reporting and videography

Design and development

Emily Yount and Seth Blanchard

Graphics

Drone footage and photogrammetry

Editing

Translation

Icons

Joanne Lee and Victoria Fogg

Map sources

Special thanks

About our process

To give readers a new perspective on the situation on the ground in Puerto Rico, we reconstructed three scenes for this story: a mountainside overtaken by a mudslide, a devastated baseball stadium and Elizabeth Ortiz's house, which was heavily damaged. To create these scenes, which use realistic 3-D models of places we visited in this story, we used drones to photograph all sides of each location, then used special stitching software to identify the shape of the locations, buildings and terrain. Then, algorithmically, we recreated the locations as three dimensional models. Some cleanup of the models is required, especially of features that do not render well with the technique. As a result, some trees and other debris were removed from the final reconstructions in the project.
After Hurricane Maria, parts of Puerto Rico are still in the dark'If there is no water, disease will come': Many in Puerto Rico still lack water service A light amid the darkness, a Puerto Rico church stands up as its community struggles Puerto Rican schoolchildren could be out of class for months Life Without Power Share:
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Life without power in Puerto Rico - and no end in sight

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This browser is not fully supported. Please update for the best experience. Scroll to continue This presentation has sound. Scroll to continue. Puerto Rico's apagón, or "super blackout," is the longest and largest major power outage in modern U.S. history. Without electricity, there is no reliable source of clean water.

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Roughly two-thirds of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar fled this year as soldiers shot them, raped them and torched their homes.

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how many syrian refugees in germany 2017

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Inside a Syrian Family's Search for a New Home

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Taimaa and her husband Mohannad are seeking asylum in Europe. TIME was there for the birth of their baby Heln. This is their story.

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Experience an interactive documentary about what connects us.

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SnowFall by the New York Times. Arguably, the watershed project that defined a new form of multimedia storytelling on the web.

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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

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Fresh powder beckoned 16 expert skiers and snowboarders into the backcountry. Then the snow gave way.

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NSA Files: Decoded also by The Guardian. The Pulitzer-winning piece covered an exhaustive topic, but kept a linear path through most of the piece.

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When Edward Snowden met journalists in his cramped room in Hong Kong's Mira hotel in June, his mission was ambitious. Amid the clutter of laundry, meal trays and his four laptops, he wanted to start a debate about mass surveillance.

He succeeded beyond anything the journalists or Snowden himself ever imagined. His disclosures about the NSA resonated with Americans from day one. But they also exploded round the world.

For some, like Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, it is a vitally important issue, one of the biggest of our time: nothing less than the defence of democracy in the digital age.

But the intelligence agencies dismiss such claims, arguing that their programs are constitutional, and subject to rigorous congressional and judicial oversight. Secrecy, they say, is essential to meet their overriding aim of protecting the public from terrorist attacks.

The debate has raged across time zones: from the US and Latin America to Europe and to Asia. Barack Obama cancelled a trip to Moscow in protest at Russian president Vladimir Putin's protection of Snowden. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff cancelled a state visit to Washington in protest at the US spying on her. Bolivian president Evo Morales's plane was forced down in Vienna amid suspicion that Snowden was being smuggled out of Russia.

In Germany, a "livid" Angela Merkel accused the US of spying on her, igniting a furore that has seen the White House concede that new constraints on the NSA's activities may be necessary. Meanwhile, in Britain, prime minister David Cameron accused the Guardian of damaging national security by publishing the revelations, warning that if it did not "demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act".

Much of the NSA's defence is that the public should be unconcerned, summed up by the dictum: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." But civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union warn that surveillance goes well beyond what Congress intended and what the US constitution allows.

Cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, chat-rooms: all allow the NSA to build what it calls 'a pattern of life', a detailed profile of a target and anyone associated with them.

And the number of people caught up in this dragnet can be huge.

Calculations are based on an analysis of Facebook that reports a typical user has an average of 190 friends and 14% of those friends are friends with each other.

Faced with growing public and political concern over the quantities of data it is collecting, the NSA has sought to reassure people, arguing that it collected only a tiny proportion of the world's internet traffic, roughly equivalent to a "dime on a basketball court". But in reality, that is still a huge amount of data. The Library of Congress, one of the biggest libraries in the world, gathers 5 terabytes a month. The NSA sucks up much, much more.

Since you began reading this, the NSA has selected

of data for review. That's about
two-hour HD movies.

The NSA say it needs all this data to help prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. In order to find the needle in the haystack, they argue, they need access to the whole haystack.

Snowden recognises the value of the NSA in counter-terrorism, but thinks the spy agency has dangerously over-reached itself. He is a fugitive from US law, in exile in Russia. But the debate he wanted to start when he decided to become a whistleblower is now happening.

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NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained

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When Edward Snowden met journalists in his cramped room in Hong Kong's Mira hotel in June, his mission was ambitious. Amid the clutter of laundry, meal trays and his four laptops, he wanted to start a debate about mass surveillance. He succeeded beyond anything the journalists or Snowden himself ever imagined.

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Explore an island threatened by climate change through the eyes of three children who call it home. FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project present "The Last Generation."

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t's a little after 3pm in Detroit's 8 Mile neighbourhood, and the cicadas are buzzing loudly in the trees. Children weave down the pavements on bicycles, while a pickup basketball game gets under way in a nearby park. The sky is a deep blue with only a hint of an approaching thunderstorm - in other words, a muggy, typical summer Sunday in Michigan's largest city.

"8 Mile", as the locals call it, is far from the much-touted economic "renaissance" taking place in Detroit's centre. Tax delinquency and debt are still major issues, as they are in most places in the city. Crime and blight exist side by side with carefully trimmed hedgerows and mowed lawns, a patchwork that changes from block to block. In many ways it resembles every other blighted neighbourhood in the city - but with one significant difference. Hidden behind the oak-lined streets is an insidious piece of history that most Detroiters, let alone Americans, don't even know exists: a half mile-long, 5ft tall concrete barrier that locals simply call "the wall".

"Growing up, we didn't know what that wall was for," says Teresa Moon, president of the 8 Mile Community Organization. "It used to be a rite of passage to walk on top of the wall, like a balancing beam. You know, just kids having fun, that kind of thing. It was only later when I found out what it was for, and when I realised the audacity that they had to build it."

In 1942, 8 Mile was a black neighbourhood - segregated by law, segregated by culture, segregated from white Oakland County by the eponymous 8 Mile Road. It was a self-contained community, filled with not only African Americans but immigrants of all colours, some of whom had built their houses with their own hands.

That wall is a monument. We survived it

Teresa Moon

It was also adjacent to empty land - valuable land that developers were rapaciously turning into homes for a surging postwar population. Land that one housing developer wanted to use to build a "whites-only neighbourhood". The only problem was, he couldn't get federal funding to develop the land unless he could prove he had a strategy to prevent black people and white people from mixing. His answer: wall off the white neighbourhood with a concrete barrier.

"That wall is a monument," says Moon. "We survived it. It's a part of what happened, and no one feels any negativity towards what happened."

Her neighbour, Lou Ross, agrees. "What that Wall was intended for, it didn't work that way. It did for a minute - but it didn't last."

Today, policymakers are making plans to revamp the nation's infrastructure. The Trump administration has pledged to create a $1tn infrastructure renewal plan, and came to power, after all, on the promise of building a massive wall. But, like Trump's wall and the 8-mile wall, infrastructure is not value-free - and the decisions made now will affect the future of inequality in our cities.

To get an understanding of how infrastructure transforms communities, there's no better place to start than the Federal Housing Authority "redlining" housing maps. Commissioned by the federal government in the 1930s, these maps were critical to decisions of where and what type of infrastructure, lending and housing each neighbourhood of each American city would be able to receive.

"The FHA promoted home ownership in new - and primarily suburban - neighbourhoods so long as they were white and not ethnically or economically diverse," writes Antero Pietila in Not in My Neighbourhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.

Left, an FHA Housing Map for Detroit circa 1939, with the 8 Mile neighbourhood clearly 'redlined'; right, an aerial photomosaic of the city in 1961, showing the completed I-94 and Route 10

If your neighbourhood had the misfortune to be "redlined", it was often doomed to a future of stillborn investment and decay. Specifically, it would be impossible to secure federally backed mortgages, a sort of scarlet letter branded across huge swaths of the city. Developers avoided these areas and concentrated investment into white areas, and services stagnated. The seeds of the future ghettos of America had been sown.

FHA maps were created for every major city in the US. Original assessment documents unearthed by researchers at the T-Races project reveal the cold, casually racist way in which data collectors consigned vast neighbourhoods to neglect and poverty:

This is a 'melting pot' area and is literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements ... It is hazardous residential territory and is accorded a general medial red grade - Original FHA evaluator report for Boyle Heights, California

The I-980 and I-880 merge in West Oakland, California

West Oakland in California is a typical example of a redlined neighbourhood. Historically a working-class community of immigrants and African Americans, it stagnated after being redlined. By the 1950s and 60s, during the interstate building boom, West Oakland was in a prime position to be carved up and paved over: full of low-income housing, it offered little to no political opposition. A literal ring of concrete was poured around the neighbourhood, the precursors to today's I-580, I-880 and I-980, and the result was decay, pollution and crime that characterised West Oakland for decades. But it was by no means alone. The process of routing roads through black communities was so common it even had a name among critics: "White roads through black bedrooms."

Nowhere is infrastructure so obviously divisive as with the vast interstate highway system. Ubiquitous, generally free and heavily used, it's undeniably a vital part of the American experience. There are more than one million miles of federal aid highways in the US, which cost $105bn a year to maintain. If American highway spending were a country, it would have the world's 63rd largest GDP, just behind Morocco. But while these roads unify and connect millions of the country's citizens, they've also excluded and destroyed many black communities.

West Baltimore is an exceptionally bleak area in an exceptionally poor, overwhelmingly black American city. The city recorded 343 homicides in 2017, the highest murder rate per capita in the country. It's almost double that of Chicago, and 18 times higher than New York City. Racial divisions run deep here, a segregation of opportunity, class and even life expectancy.

On a humid September morning, police cars darted furiously through empty streets, their sirens blaring. In front of the housing complex where Freddie Gray was killed in 2015, two white police officers questioned a young black man in an SUV, their hands resting on their weapons. Many of the homes have boarded-up windows and doors, and even wooden scaffolding to prevent them from collapsing. The city has more than 16,000 abandoned properties, some of them vacant for decades.

In the middle of this blight stands a monument to failed American city planning: a giant ditch that bisects West Baltimore neatly into north and south. Officially named State Route 40, it was originally intended to be a key part of a proposed east-west freeway presented as crucial to the city's growth. This gigantic project upended hundreds of lives, transformed an entire landscape and cost tens of millions of dollars. The locals call it the "road to nowhere".

"It was an obvious name to give," says Denise Johnson, a community organiser who grew up in West Baltimore. "We lost families, we lost homeowners, we lost businesses, and we lost churches. And we lost people. People who were stable. People who didn't plan to leave the community."

In the 1950s, a vast increase in cars was beginning to clog the roads to and from the new suburbs. The federal government poured money into the brand new interstate system, encouraging radials, arteries and thoroughfares through dense urban neighbourhoods. This also presented city planners with what seemed an unprecedented opportunity - to use federal funds to clear out "slums" and open up vast tracts of land.

A view of Baltimore's freeways, with the 'road to nowhere' visible in the centre

Where to build a freeway became not only an economic decision, but also a moral one - a chance to uplift and sweep clean America's ghettos.

But were they ghettos?

"This was not a neighbourhood that was struggling," says John Bullock, the city councilman for Baltimore's ninth district, which includes the road to nowhere. "We're talking about middle-class neighbourhoods, which were seen through the eyes of others as slums or ghettos because of the colour of the people who lived there."

The road, says Bullock, who also teaches political science at Towson University, was yet another example of infrastructure marginalising black citizens. "We're talking about generations of black people who have faced these challenges. Not only from the highway, but also disinvestment, the redlining, the lack of employment. Because if we say housing was lost, churches were lost, we have to remember also businesses were lost. And oftentimes people have to go outside their communities to spend that money, which never gets recirculated in that community."

Moreover, while the freeways opened up routes from the suburbs to the city centres, there were often a conspicuous lack of entrances in black communities. The gigantic concrete ditch in West Baltimore is a perfect example: sunken, without exits - it effectively seals off one side from the other.

Interstates touched the lives of millions of people, in hundreds of cities across the US. From Atlanta to Chicago, Denver to New York, black communities felt the twin pain of urban decay and expropriation of land. But before the Voting Rights Act, black people had no legal recourse through which to oppose such plans.

"I call it the falseness of community engagement," says Denise Johnson, her voice rising with emotion at the frustration of decades of failed promises. "Back then, when they were building that highway, there was no mandated policy that you had to engage the community. Now, there is a mandated policy to engage the community, which is a good thing. But at the same time, it's still just ... their agenda."

Abandoned properties in Baltimore's Oliver neighbourhood

In recent years those failed promises have included the Red Line. This was a light rail project, heavily championed by the city council, that would have connected East and West Baltimore, and provided thousands of jobs and economic development. The proposed route of the Red Line would have been overlaid on the road to nowhere, with a stop at Harlem Park in West Baltimore. But despite the project winning federal approval and funding, incoming governor Larry Hogan cancelled the project, citing its cost, enraging the city government and large portions of the African American community.

In Baltimore, the added insult was that the road to nowhere didn't even have to happen. To this day, the one-mile, six-lane road sees so little traffic that when it is shut down, as it is occasionally due to film shoots or snowfall, hardly anyone notices. It ends abruptly just outside the city, a strange amputation that is now a park-and-ride, cleaving a terrible wound through the middle of a major city for no reason: too big to replace, too expensive to tear down.

Detroit, like Baltimore, also suffered disruptive interstate projects that decimated African American communities. Submerged highways snake through the city: I-94, I-96, I-75. Home to the automobile, it may be the best connected city in America for cars. Above these transportation corridors, the ghost factories of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler dot a desolate landscape that resembles an urban prairie.

One such district teeming with available land is the historically African American neighbourhood that used to be known as Black Bottom. It was a vibrant, dense area in a prime location just north-east of downtown, with a nationally renowned music scene and home to many famous residents, including boxer Joe Louis and the first African American mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young. The area was mixed, rich and poor, with migrants from Syria, Poland and Germany co-existing in a bustling urban area that ran from the Detroit river all the way up to Grand Ave. Young called it a "thrilling convergence of people, a wonderfully versatile and self-contained society".

Hastings Street used to be the main thoroughfare in the Detroit neighbourhood of Black Bottom; an aerial shot of the area today

By the mid-1950s, however, the declining auto industry had hit Black Bottom hard, and the all-white Detroit city council deemed it a "slum". The neighbourhood became one of the first casualties in the grand " Detroit Plan ". Freeways, hospitals, universities and housing developments were planned and built, creating radical changes to the city fabric, including the destruction of vast amounts of housing to construct Route 10 and I-75.

While some improvements were applauded and created highly valuable land, like Lafayette Park, almost all of the beneficiaries of the improved housing stock were white. Tens of thousands of African Americans were either forced into high-rent properties or high-rise public housing projects. Moreover, white landowners often prevented African Americans from renting in " white communities ". The forced removals of the 1950s remain one of the single biggest upheavals in the city's modern history.

Today, Black Bottom is gone. All that remains are some vacant industrial buildings, empty fields and I-75.

In Jackson Ward, a neighbourhood in Richmond, Virginia, the story was much the same. Formed after the civil war by urban African Americans and recently freed slaves, it was an unlikely place for a vibrant black community (the city was the capital of the briefly lived Confederate States of America).

But vibrant it was. The business community there was known as "black Wall Street" and its social and economic capital earned it the nickname the "Harlem of the South". Maggie Walker, the first female bank president (of any race) to charter a bank in the US, lived there; a statue of her welcomes visitors to the Ward today. The area was central to the civil rights movement in Richmond and today is honoured with US National Park Service historic status.

Jackson Ward began to change, however, during the second world war. The construction of Gilpin Court, a large public housing project, and the I-95, a transport artery to connect Richmond to its neighbours, saw federal funds pour in. Unsurprisingly, the formerly redlined, historically important neighbourhood of Jackson Ward was chosen as the path of construction.

Photographs show the breadth of the interstate - almost a city block wide. The southern section was fortunate in its proximity to downtown, and parts of it are now a sought-after neighbourhood. But the northern section, anchored by Gilpin Court and the Shockoe Hill cemetery, were isolated. Roads, businesses and homes were demolished, turning Gilpin Court into an island. The area plunged into an economic and cultural malaise, disintegrating into blocks of land now filled only with grass.

One small victory was the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist church, a historic site of worship built in 1884, which had the misfortune to be located directly in the path of the interstate. With the bulldozers looming, a loud and furious resistance from community members prevented construction proceeding as planned. The church was permitted to stand, and the entire interstate was re-engineered to bend around it - one of the few symbols of resistance still visible.

Today, northern Jackson Ward is still 96% African American, and the average income is only $9,357, far below the poverty line of $15,000.

Making the case that infrastructure itself can be exclusionary is hardly straightforward. Many of the worst decisions in US planning were made decades ago to intentionally disenfranchise, marginalise and separate communities; policies such as redlining and "blight clearing" are well-documented embarrassments. But many decisions that segregated communities were unintentional. The stop sign and one-way street might seem benign, but they shape our lives in ways we sometimes don't even realise.

Roads, bridges and walls are agents of change, with a direct impact on our lives. Who has control over where these are placed? Who says how many there will be? How big? As the US gears up for its biggest infrastructure revitalisation project in decades, it is only by asking these questions and acknowledging the power of city planning to impact lives that we can hope to prevent the injustices of the past and fix those of the present.
Johnny Miller is the founder of the NGO africanDRONE. This story was produced in part with a travel grant and technology support from Code for Africa and from the International Center for Journalists Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here

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Roads to nowhere: how infrastructure built on American inequality

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From highways carved through thriving 'ghettoes' to walls segregating black and white neighbourhoods, US city development has a long and divisive history

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Falmata was told that if she killed non-believers, she would go straight to paradise.

Like other women, her target would be a market or another crowded place.

"I was so scared that I started crying. But they kept telling me to be patient, to accept that this is what life is about," she says.

"[They said] that on reaching paradise, everything would be better."

Two other girls from the camp had also been strapped to explosives, and the three of them were taken to the outskirts of a village.

They were ordered to start walking towards the busy areas - someone would be watching them from a distance, they were told.

In their hands were small, homemade detonators.

On the way, the three of them discussed whether to carry out the "mission" or abandon it.

Should they just do as they were ordered, or try to make their escape?

They decided not to carry out the attack.

After asking a stranger to help her remove the belt, Falmata made off down a dusty road.

She had not gone far before she met two men on the side of the road. What she didn't know was that they, too, belonged to Boko Haram - but a different unit.

Falmata was kidnapped for a second time.

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Made-up to look beautiful. Sent out to die.

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Falmata was told that if she killed non-believers, she would go straight to paradise. Like other women, her target would be a market or another crowded place. "I was so scared that I started crying. But they kept telling me to be patient, to accept that this is what life is about," she says.

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Photographer: Shiho Fukada

Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan, with the world's oldest population (27.3 percent of its citizens are 65 or older, almost twice the share in the U.S.), has been dealing with one it didn't foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior. Their crimes are usually minor-9 in 10 senior women who've been convicted were found guilty of shoplifting.

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that's changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo's government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don't have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.

Even women with a place to go describe feeling invisible. "They may have a house. They may have a family. But that doesn't mean they have a place they feel at home," says Yumi Muranaka, head warden of Iwakuni Women's Prison, 30 miles outside Hiroshima. "They feel they are not understood. They feel they are only recognized as someone who gets the house chores done."

Elderly women are also often economically vulnerable-nearly half of those 65 or older who live alone also live in poverty relative to the broader population, for example, compared with 29 percent of men. "My husband died last year," one inmate says. "We didn't have any children, so I was all alone. I went to a supermarket to buy vegetables, and I saw a package of beef. I wanted it, but I thought it would be a financial burden. So I took it."

Neither the government nor the private sector has established an effective rehabilitation program for seniors, and the costs to keep them in prison are rising fast. Expenses associated with elder care helped push annual medical costs at correctional facilities past 6 billion yen (more than $50 million) in 2015, an 80 percent increase from a decade before. Specialized workers have been hired to help older inmates with bathing and toileting during the day, but at night these tasks are handled by guards.

At some facilities, being a correctional officer has come to resemble being a nursing-home attendant. Satomi Kezuka, a veteran officer at Tochigi Women's Prison, about 60 miles north of Tokyo, says her duties now include dealing with incontinence. "They are ashamed and hide their underwear," she says of the inmates. "I tell them to bring it to me, and I will have it washed." More than a third of female correctional officers quit their jobs within three years.

In 2016, Japan's parliament passed a law aiming to ensure that recidivist seniors get support from the country's welfare and social-service systems. Since then, prosecutor's offices and prisons have worked closely with government agencies to get senior offenders the assistance they need. But the problems that lead these women to seek the relative comfort of jail lie beyond the system's reach.

"I was living alone on welfare. I used to live with my daughter's family and used all my savings taking care of an abusive and violent son-in-law."

"I shoplifted more than 20 times, all clothes, not expensive ones, mostly on sale on the street. It's not that I was in need of money. The first time I shoplifted, I didn't get caught. I learned that I could obtain what I wanted without paying for it, which I found fun, amusing, exciting.

"My husband has been supportive. He writes me regularly. My two sons are angry-my three grandchildren don't know I'm here. They think I'm hospitalized."

"When I was young, I didn't think about stealing. All I thought about was working hard. I worked at a rubber factory for 20 years and then as a care worker at a hospital. Money was always tight, but we still got to send our son to college.

"My husband had a stroke six years ago and has been bedridden ever since. He also has dementia and suffers from delusions and paranoia. It was a lot to take care of him physically and emotionally because of my old age. But I couldn't talk about my stress with anyone because I was ashamed.

"I was imprisoned for the first time when I was 70. When I shoplifted, I had money in my wallet. Then I thought about my life. I didn't want to go home, and I had nowhere else to go. Asking for help in prison was the only way.

"My life is much easier in prison. I can be myself and breathe, however temporarily. My son tells me I'm ill and I should be hospitalized in a mental institution and take it easy. But I don't think I'm ill. I think my anxiety drove me to steal."

"I was alone every day and feeling very lonely. My husband gave me a lot of money, and people always told me how lucky I was, but money wasn't what I wanted. It didn't make me happy at all.

"The first time I shoplifted was about 13 years ago. I wandered into a bookstore in town and stole a paperback novel. I was caught, taken to a police station, and questioned by the sweetest police officer. He was so kind. He listened to everything I wanted to say. I felt I was being heard for the first time in my life. In the end, he gently tapped on my shoulder and said, 'I understand you were lonely, but don't do this again.'

"I can't tell you how much I enjoy working in the prison factory. The other day, when I was complimented on how efficient and meticulous I was, I grasped the joy of working. I regret that I never worked. My life would have been different.

"I enjoy my life in prison more. There are always people around, and I don't feel lonely here. When I got out the second time, I promised that I wouldn't go back. But when I was out, I couldn't help feeling nostalgic."

"I was living on welfare. It was hard. When I'm released, I will manage to live with 1,000 yen [$9] a day. I don't have anything to look forward to outside."

"Prison is an oasis for me-a place for relaxation and comfort. I don't have freedom here, but I have nothing to worry about, either. There are many people to talk to. They provide us with nutritious meals three times a day.

"My daughter visits once a month. She says 'I don't feel sorry for you. You're pathetic.' I think she's right."

This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the International Women's Media Foundation.

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Japan's Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women

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Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan, with the world's oldest population (27.3 percent of its citizens are 65 or older, almost twice the share in the U.S.), has been dealing with one it didn't foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group.

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Years-long wait lists, bewildering legal arguments, an extended stay in detention - you can experience it all in the Waiting Game, a newsgame that simulates the experience of trying to seek asylum in the United States. The game was created by ProPublica, Playmatics and WNYC. Based on the true stories of real asylum-seekers, this interactive portal allows users to follow in the footsteps of five people fleeing persecution and trying to take refuge in America.

The process can be exhausting and feel arbitrary - and as you'll find in the game, it involves a lot of waiting. Once asylum-seekers reach America, they must condense complex and often traumatic stories into short, digestible narratives they will tell again and again. Their lives often depend on their ability to convince a judge that they are in danger. Judicial decisions are so inconsistent across the country, success in complicated cases can come down to geography and luck -- in New York City only 17 percent of asylum cases are denied in immigration court; in Atlanta, 94 percent are. Increasingly, many asylum-seekers are held in detention for months or even years while going through the system. The immigration detention system costs more than $2 billion per year to maintain.

The Trump administration has tried to reframe the asylum system as a national security threat and a magnet for illegal immigration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions characterizes the American asylum process as "subject to rampant abuse" and "overloaded with fake claims." He has aimed recent reforms at expediting asylum adjudications to speed up deportations and at making it more difficult for certain groups to qualify for protection, such as Central Americans who claim to fear gender-based violence or gang persecution.

The narrative that the system is overrun with fraud has long been pushed by groups that favor limiting immigration overall. They point to some 37 percent of asylum-seekers who annually miss their immigration hearings as evidence that people without legitimate fears of persecution game the system. They argue that allowing asylum-seekers to obtain work permits while they wait for a decision on their cases - which sometimes takes years - incentivizes baseless claims.

But another picture emerged when ProPublica spoke with more than 20 experts and stakeholders who study and work in the asylum system, including lawyers, immigration judges, historians, policy experts, an asylum officer, a former border patrol agent and a former ICE prosecutor.

When asked about changes to the system they'd like to see, many suggested providing asylum-seekers with better access to lawyers to support due process, expanding the definition of a refugee to cover modern-day conflicts,providing more resources to help the system process claims in a timely manner, and improving judicial independence by moving immigration courts out of the Department of Justice.

Most acknowledged some level of asylum-claim abuse exists. "In any system, of course, there are going to be some bad actors and some weaknesses people seek to exploit," said Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000.

But they also argued for the importance of protecting and improving a national program that has provided refuge to hundreds of thousands of people. "If you are going to make a mistake in the immigration area, make this mistake," said Bill Hing, director of the University of San Francisco's Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic. "Protect people that may not need protecting, but don't make the mistake of not protecting people who need it."

Victor Manjarrez, a former border patrol agent from the 1980s until 2011, said he had seen human smuggling networks exploit the border over the years, but also many people who genuinely needed help.

"We have a system that's not perfect, but is designed to take refugees. That is the beauty of it," he said. "It has a lot of issues, but we have something in place that is designed to be compassionate. And that's why we have such a big political debate about this."

The asylum system was created in the wake of the U.S. and other countries' refusal to let in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

World War II sparked our current asylum and refugee policy. During the war, safe countries like the United States largely shut their doors to Jewish refugees, citing national security concerns. In one notorious example, the U.S. turned away a boat of nearly 1,000 Jews escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. More than a quarter of the ship's refugees eventually were killed in Europe during the Holocaust.

After the war, the international community attempted to create a more orderly system for aiding people in danger. This resulted in the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol, which defined a refugee as a person fleeing persecution based on "race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion." The convention included an article prohibiting countries from penalizing refugees for entering a foreign country illegally as long as "they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence." It also obligated signatories not to return any asylum-seekers to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

The U.S. signed on, but initially dealt with refugee crises on a case-by-case basis, usually tied to foreign policy objectives. Early major refugee programs addressed people fleeing Communist countries, including the resettlement of Hungarian refugees after the 1956 revolution, the Vietnamese resettlement program after the Vietnam War, and refugee boat lifts after the Cuban revolution.

The U.S.' current system to accept refugees wasn't created until decades later.

It wasn't until President Jimmy Carter's last year in office that the U.S. passed a formal law, the 1980 Refugee Act, to provide a permanent system for admitting refugees. This law was a product of the universal human rights activist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a moment when nationalism was at an ebb. "It set up a mechanism where the United States can accept refugees from all over the world. In the decades prior, those admissions were much more targeted and limited," said Carl Bon Tempo, a historian at SUNY Albany and the author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War.

The law created formal programs: for refugee resettlement from abroad, and for asylum-seekers who ask for protection once already inside the U.S.

On the simplest level, the law had two components: one that resettles refugees vetted abroad by the United Nations, and another to process asylum-seekers fleeing immediate danger who arrive in America first and then apply for protection.

If a person seeking protection makes it into the interior of the U.S. - often after first entering on a legal visa - they can file what is called an "affirmative" asylum application within one year. This means they'll have an interview with a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer in a non-adversarial setting. Less than a third of applicants are granted asylum in the interview stage. The rest are referred to immigration court.

If an asylum-seeker presents a claim at the border or is caught and ordered deported but expresses a "credible fear" of persecution in their home country, they can only file a "defensive" application - and then are sent straight to the immigration court system. Applicants have about a 50 percent chance of receiving asylum in the courts, though it varies widely by judge.

When Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act, they didn't anticipate how often it would be used.

"When asylum was first written into the Refugee Act, it was not viewed as the path that maybe tens of thousands of people, or even thousands of people, might claim annually as their way to get in," said Bon Tempo. "It was seen as a legal pathway for someone to gain admission, but that very few will pursue."

That's not what happened. The introduction of the act coincided with civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua that triggered a large-scale migration. Asylum applications quickly rose. Over the years, the expansion of affordable travel has also meant that asylum-seekers from all over the world can more easily reach the U.S. on visas to find immediate safety and then apply for protection. The number of asylum applications has fluctuated over the years, but in 2014, it began to rise sharply, this time mostly from Central Americans trying to escape rampant gang violence their governments have been unable to control. Most of them arrived at the border and filed defensive asylum applications.

"Part of the problem with modern asylum procedure is you have so many people applying, many more than the system can actually handle," Bon Tempo said.

Though the law hasn't changed, the Trump administration has been reshaping the asylum system in other ways.

The Trump administration has promised to cut both legal and illegal immigration. A big piece of this effort is reframing the asylum system as a national security issue instead of a humanitarian program and characterizing asylum-seekers at the border as illegal entrants.

"Congress has so far refused to pass draconian legislation the administration wants that would cut off access to U.S. refugee protection," said Eleanor Acer, the director of the refugee protection program at Human Rights First. "The administration is trying to do everything it can... to limit access to asylum and to rush people through the process, giving the appearance of due process while at the same time undercutting it."

When asked about the criticism, a spokesperson from the Department of Justice said the reforms are "common sense" and "designed to increase efficiency and productivity in an immigration court system that has languished after years of neglect and failed leadership, and all are made while ensuring that due process is not compromised."

Much of the administration's efforts have been aimed at the asylum case backlog.

The recent spike in claims from Central Americans at the U.S.-Mexico border has contributed to an unprecedented backlog of more than 680,000 cases in immigration courts, more than double the number in 2013 (these include both defensive asylum cases and other types of immigration cases). There are also 300,000 affirmative cases waiting to be processed by USCIS, an increase of 1,750 percent over the last five years. Asylum-seekers often wait three to four years to have their cases heard, and the process can take even longer if they are initially denied and then appeal their cases. In 2016, the most current year of complete data available, 20,455 applicants were granted asylum and 11,643 were denied. In the same year, more than 180,000 new asylum applications were filed.

Some, like Sessions, worry that a backlog invites perverse incentives. Once asylum-seekers file an application, some are eligible to apply for a work permit if they have not received a decision after 180 days. (It usually takes 240 days to actually get a work permit.) If their cases take years to be reviewed, that means they may spend all that time working and establishing themselves in the U.S., and eventually can apply for another form of legal residency.

Though Sessions argues there is "rampant fraud" in the asylum system, there is no clear evidence to quantify how widespread the problem is.

Experts say fraud does not define the system.

"We do a really good job of handling asylum fraud," said a current USCIS asylum officer, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Even if someone manages to get a benefit in the short term, we always come back and get them. We do asylum terminations if we find evidence." Examples include identifying rehearsed stories that are repeated over and over, or catching misrepresentations, like African men who claim persecution because they are gay, but later file for a wife's residency papers.

Many asylum-seekers with legal representation also undergo physical and psychological evaluations to help support their case, and sometimes country experts are called to assess an asylum-seeker's story. The Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts, also has a Law Library and Immigration Research Center to keep up-to-date on human rights conditions in different countries.

Most immigration experts say outright fraud is rare. Even though many asylum cases are rejected, they are usually filed by people in good faith with legitimate fears, but who may not fit a narrow interpretation of asylum law.

Other false claims, as Javad Khazeli, a former ICE prosecutor from 2003 to 2010 explained, can be attributed to immigration scams. Over the years, he saw cases of immigrants duped by what's known as a "notario" - people who falsely market themselves as qualified to give legal advice. These non-attorneys sometimes promise undocumented immigrants they can help them obtain a work permit, and instead file an asylum claim on their behalf. The person gets a work permit while they're waiting, and then are surprised and confused when their case comes up, Khazeli, now an immigration lawyer, said.

But he questioned trying to paint the asylum system as rife with false claims. "One of the driving forces of the small percentage of fraudulent cases are notarios, sure," he said. "How do you put notarios out of business? You make sure people have access to good legal services."

Advocates say there's a problem with the system that needs to be addressed: The government should provide asylum-seekers with lawyers, since the cases often involve life or death stakes.

This was a solution favored by many experts ProPublica spoke with. While asylum-seekers have the right to find legal representation, they are not entitled to a free lawyer. Applicants have legal counsel in only 37 percent of cases that go through immigration courts. Asylum-seekers held in detention in remote locations often have particular difficulty finding representation. This can make a big difference: 90 percent of applicants without representation had their cases denied in 2016, versus nearly 50 percent of applicants with lawyers.

"These are death penalty cases - you fear you'll be killed if you are sent back and you don't even have an attorney," said Karen Musalo, the director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at University of California Hastings. Even children are not guaranteed legal representation. Yet, studies have shown that children who have access to legal counsel are far more likely to show up for their hearing than those who don't.

Though it's difficult to estimate how much it would cost the federal government to provide legal counsel to every applicant in immigration court, a few studies have tried to put a number on it: A 2014 economic analysis estimated that such a program would largely be offset by reduced detention costs, and cost $4 million extra a year. A study from 2016 that focused on California estimated each immigration case would cost $5,000 in legal fees.

Instead, the Justice Department seems to have made it even more difficult for asylum-seekers to access legal counsel.

This month, Sessions announced the department would temporarily halt a know-your-rights and pro-bono legal program and telephone help-line that serves nearly 50,000 detained immigrants per year, in order to assess effectiveness and costs. The program costs $6 million annually.

"I don't think we pay enough attention to our immigration court system," said Manjarrez, the former Border Patrol agent. Lawyers who are familiar with complicated immigration law can also help make sure asylum claims are clear and well-documented, saving time, he said. "If checks are being cut and I'm the Border Patrol guy, and they say, 'We'll give you more agents and more wall,' I'd say, 'No -- send it to the immigration courts.' It'll help us in the long term, because they'll help the flow and start to slow detentions."

The immigration court system has made progress in hiring new judges since Trump took office, putting the total at 334. But more than 100 positions are still vacant and advocates estimate it would take around 200 extra judges to tackle the backlog.

Another short-term tactic to stem the backlog and limit fraud is to process newer asylum cases more quickly. In March, USCIS announced a new policy: Instead of processing affirmative asylum claims on a chronological basis, they'll now switch to handling the newest claims first. Lawyers are alarmed that clients with strong asylum claims who have been waiting for years to move on with their lives will now be put on hold indefinitely. "I think that's going to have a devastating impact," said Jaya Ramji-Nogales, a law professor at Temple University and the author of Refugee Roulette. "If their claim was granted, they could bring their family over and regularize their family's status here. Now they'll be stuck in limbo."

But Meissner saw the measure as a pragmatic step to restore faith in the system and get asylum claims processed in a timely manner again. She said during her time leading the INS, the precursor to USCIS, she faced the challenge of reducing a backlog of more than 400,000 cases in 1994. INS instituted a similar last-in, first-out system and made asylum-seekers wait six months to get a work permit instead of as soon as they filed an application. The changes yielded results: new claims slowed and approvals went up. "These are tough decisions," she said. "What you want to do is set up the system that makes it possible to do the job and curb the possibility of abuses."

More worrisome to some are new policies aimed at the courts.

Sessions has broad authority over immigration courts because they operate under the U.S. Department of Justice. This means he has the power to select immigration judges, overturn Board of Immigration Appeals decisions, and decide precedents, all with little oversight.

In April, the Justice Department introduced a quota system on immigration judges tied to their job performance ratings. The new rule requires judges to process at least 700 cases a year (they usually process an average of 678) to earn a satisfactory grade. Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said such a change would damage the court's credibility. "Quotas and deadlines that have been announced are, frankly, unreasonable," she said. "The very concept is in conflict with the independent decision-making authority of judges."

Last year, the Justice Department also released a memo encouraging immigration judges to "carefully consider administrative efficiency" before granting continuance requests, which allow asylum-seekers extra time to find legal representation or gather necessary documents. The memo cited a 2012 DOJ Inspector General report that found that "frequent and lengthy continuances" were a significant factor in increased case processing times and that over half of all cases surveyed had one or more continuances.

Lawyers predicted these new policies may actually increase the immigration court backlog because rushed asylum hearings would result in more lawyers appealing cases, arguing that due process was violated.

Recent changes aren't just about speeding up asylum decisions and deportations.

On the campaign trail, Trump often decried what he called "catch and release" -- processing asylum-seekers with an initial screening at the border, and then releasing them on bond until their court date. His administration has begun detaining almost all defensive asylum-seekers coming through the border until their cases are heard, arguing that this is a necessary step to ensure the immigrants don't melt away and miss their hearings.

But lawyers see the expansion of detention as an effort to deter asylum-seekers from continuing with their claims - which contravenes international law. "Our detention system is unique in the way that it is truly prison-like, even though we recognize that asylum is not part of the criminal justice process," said Denise Gilman, a law professor who runs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas. Keeping asylum-seekers locked up for months or even years when they've committed no crime further traumatizes people already suffering, she said. Some simply give up and accept deportation in order to leave detention.

Sessions has also indicated plans to make it even more difficult for some types of asylum cases to qualify for protection. In March, he referred two major Board of Immigration Appeals cases to himself. In one, he vacated a ruling that held asylum applicants have the right to a full hearing before a judge, an effort to cut off asylum-seekers who spend years trying to appeal denied cases or who have cases that, on paper, look unlikely to succeed. Advocates worry the decision may be used to summarily deport asylum-seekers who face language barriers or have difficulty documenting their asylum claims, especially those without legal counsel.

In the other case, he is reviewing whether victims of "private crime" - in this case, domestic violence - can qualify for asylum. Experts predict the decision may also be used to prevent most Central Americans fleeing gang violence from receiving asylum.

Gang violence and domestic abuse fall under the most flexible of the five asylum categories: "membership in a particular social group." This has been a controversial category for years, lawyers said, because it does not have a clear definition. In parts of Central America, people don't face outright war, "but high levels of civil violence, often combined with an inability of the government to protect its people," said Leon Rodriguez, director of USCIS from 2013 to 2017. "The upshot is that you have a lot of people who are pretty scared, and in a lot of cases, are really at risk of dying violently when returning to countries, but it doesn't fit into the traditional definition of asylum and refugee status."

Some judges regularly accept the "particular social group" categorization for women facing gender-based violence; others rarely do. In recent years, gang violence in Central America has risen to an unprecedented level and pushed countless people to flee for their lives, but the courts still only recognize Central Americans claiming gang persecution as legitimate asylum-seekers in narrow cases - around 80 percent of asylum claims from Central America were denied in immigration court in 2016.

While Sessions' decision on the issue, expected in May, may narrow the definition to exclude almost all Central American claims, advocates have long argued for widening the language of "particular social group" to help meet the struggles of the specific conflicts that the world faces today.

"Nobody would be able to predict what forms persecution would take in the future, so the authors of the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 protocol purposely designed a definition that would adapt to changing modern reality," said Stephen Legomsky, the chief counsel of USCIS from 2011 to 2013. He favors expanding the "particular social group" language to fit people fleeing gender-based violence in countries that don't have adequate legal systems to protect women and LGBT communities, and some people trying to escape gangs.

But these kinds of steps seem unlikely under the current administration. As Bon Tempo, the historian, noted, refugee policy has always been "a product of politics, and controversial."

"I try to caution people against falling into two traps: the 'Statue of Liberty' idea: "give us your poor, your wretched," open-door image. And the other extreme, like what happens in the 1930s, where European Jews are facing persecution from the Nazis and America does largely shut its doors," he said.

"The reason immigration politics gets so hot is because it basically is an exercise in self-definition: This is what the U.S. is. This is what we stand for. And there are a lot of different opinions on what the actual answers to those questions are."

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Sisi Wei, Nick Fortugno, Kavitha Surana, Matt Katz

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Years-long wait lists, bewildering legal arguments, an extended stay in detention - you can experience it all in the Waiting Game, a newsgame that simulates the experience of trying to seek asylum in the United States. The game was created by ProPublica, Playmatics and WNYC.

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1) Identify your story. Make sure it's well-suited to Visual Multimedia storytelling

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1) Identify your story. Make sure it's well-suited to Visual Multimedia storytelling

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The best multimedia stories are often multifaceted and include action, context, strong characters and powerful emotions, all of which can be conveyed through different forms of media.

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2) When creating a multimedia story, begin with an outline of the story focus and audience. What is it you want to explore and communicate, and to who?

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2) When creating a multimedia story, begin with an outline of the story focus and audience. What is it you want to explore and communicate, and to who?

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Because you can't really make any decisions until you've figured this out. Your focus might be more of a question than a statement.

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Bonus Tip: Your focus is often a question not a statement. 

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Bonus Tip: Your focus is often a question not a statement. 

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When I started my story about the SNWTP, it started from some insights and questions I had after reading a research report. The main question I wanted to explore was how are the people and places at the locations of the water to be transferred from being impacted. I was also very interested in how sustainable the transfer might be long term. Then I went out on a genuine enquiry.

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3) Consider the approach you want to use to deliver your story 

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3) Consider the approach you want to use to deliver your story 

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CONTINUOUS; COMPREHENSIVE; IMMERSIVE or possibly on an INTERSECTION. You'll also want to consider if your story should be linear or non-linear. Most stories should be linear.

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4) Decide what the segments of the story will be and what will be presented in text, audio, video, photos etc.

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4) Decide what the segments of the story will be and what will be presented in text, audio, video, photos etc.

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Break your story down into parts such as who, what, when, where, why and how. Who are the main characters in your story? What is the event or situation? What is the context? Understanding these constituent parts will help you to decide what media are necessary to your story.

The classic approach for many multimedia feature - and it works well because it plays to the strengths of each medium - is to have human interest and impact stories in visuals like video and/or photo, while text and graphics add broader issues context, data and detail. Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt, The Guardian's The Shirt on Your Back and Drinking the Northwest Wind all do this. However there are many other approaches that work brilliantly.

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Bonus Tip: Which mediums should you choose?

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Bonus Tip: Which mediums should you choose?

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This is a fun way to brainstorm which mediums might be best suited to your story parts.

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5) Now is the time to start thinking of the narrative

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5) Now is the time to start thinking of the narrative

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Bearing in mind that most stories will be linear, Once you have your story parts and potential mediums you can then start thinking beginning, middle and end. And of course each individual media will have it’s own narrative with beginning middle and end too.

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It might help to create a storyboard. You'll need to think carefully about transitions... consider how it will all come together, establishing a clear flow from start to finish.

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Start from the deadline and set out mini goals. Include, where possible, a few days' grace between finishing and submission with time to get feedback from peers and tutors and for yourself to come back for the final cut with fresh eyes and mind.
Ensure the timeline includes
testing across multiple devices.

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BONUS TIP Every story will be different. 

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BONUS TIP Every story will be different. 

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Depending on how much you know about the story and what you will capture you might be able to do all these steps in the pre-production phase. But this is often not the case, that shouldn't stop you trying! Anticipate and come up with some ideas and options, but build in flexibility for how things unfold during reporting. Do these steps as soon as your story starts to unfold. Jig things as you go along and of course - the edit is where you really start to cook! Storytelling is a craft, not a formula. It's a struggle every-time and so it should be.

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Go film, interview, shoot... go get your story!

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How We Did This

Why A T-Shirt?

We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt. We wanted to make an ordinary shirt like the vast majority of the shirts sold in this country - not organic cotton, not hand-sewn in the United States.

To figure out how many shirts to make, and to raise money to pay for them, we turned to Kickstarter. Our goal was to sell 2,000 shirts. In the end, we sold 25,000.

(Thanks again to everyone who ordered a shirt. Really. Amazing. We couldn't have done it without you!)

Why A Squirrel?

The design on the shirt, a squirrel hoisting a martini glass, is a visual pun: a reference to the phrase "animal spirits" made famous by the economist John Maynard Keynes.

As Planet Money's David Kestenbaum put it recently: "Keynes' idea was that there's more to the markets than just numbers; there are people and emotions making decisions. And to the extent that we are finding the human element in the very dry subject of economics, it's actually perfect for us."

10 Reporters, 3 Continents, 1 Archipelago

We flew drones over Mississippi. We got mugged in Chittagong, Bangladesh. We met people whom we'll never forget - the actual people who make our clothing. At every location we had radio reporters and videographers.

More T-Shirt Stories!

Good news: We have more T-shirt stories than we could fit on this site.

For more, subscribe to the Planet Money podcast.

A Little Help From Our Friends

Adam Davidson, Planet Money co-founder, came up with the idea of doing this project in the first place more than three years ago.

We were inspired a lot by a book: The Travels Of A T-shirt In The Global Economy. In fact, we hired the author, Pietra Rivoli, to be an adviser on the project. She's a professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Bawen, Indonesia: Jess Jiang faces the classic producer's dilemma: One machine tells a story. A thousand create a racket.

After several years of trying and failing to make a T-shirt from scratch, we finally found some help from Jockey Corp. Marion Smith, the director of global sourcing for Jockey, was patient with us on the phone. (T-shirts are knitted, not woven. They're made from something that looks like thread but is called yarn.) Eventually, Jockey agreed to sell us T-shirts - and, more important, to let us follow the creation of those shirts.

The Planet Money T-shirts are made of fabric that Jockey's textile experts developed. They're based on a design pattern Jockey uses for its own T-shirt line. Jockey introduced us to its suppliers in Bangladesh and Colombia, and those suppliers agreed to assemble our shirts. And Jockey designers helped us pick out the colors for our shirts.

Credits

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Alex Blumberg

PROJECT ADVISER: Pietra Rivoli/McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

MANAGING PRODUCERS: Kainaz Amaria, Brian Boyer and Joshua Davis

PLANET MONEY: Quoctrung Bui, Zoe Chace, Jacob Goldstein, Jess Jiang, Caitlin Kenney, David Kestenbaum, Marianne McCune and Robert Smith

VIDEO DIRECTOR: Joshua Davis

MULTIMEDIA PRODUCERS: Kainaz Amaria, Joshua Davis, and Claire O'Neill

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO: Kainaz Amaria, Nacho Corbella, Joshua Davis, David Gilkey, Eric Helton, James Jensen, Soren Jensen, Katie Hayes Luke and David Nevala

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Jeremy Bowers, Danny DeBelius, Alyson Hurt and Wes Lindamood ( Source code on GitHub)

WRITER: Jacob Goldstein

COPY EDITING: Janey Adams, Stephanie Federico, Avie Schneider and Susan Vavrick

ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION: Phia Bennin, Anirvan Ghosh, Frank Hernandez, Seth Maxon, Melissa Melvin-Rodriguez, Molly Messick, Eileen Mignoni, Urmila Ramakrishnan, Tiffany Salone and Alejandra Vengoechea

MOTION GRAPHICS: Suzanne Batmanghelichi and Adam Cole

SOUND EDITING: Drew Kennedy

LEGAL: Ashley Messenger and Brian Rideout

T-SHIRT ILLUSTRATOR: Bob Bianchini

ARCHIVAL VIDEO: AP Archive, U.S. Department of Agriculture ( via archive.org)

MUSIC:
"The Journey," "Goldengrove v2," "Wallflower" (Keith Kenniff/Unseen Music)
"Fire Ignorance," "Anthem" (Tyler Strickland)
"Club Coolada" (Cream Dream/Crash Symbols)
"Shade of Music" (Elias Music Library/Getty Music Library)
"B&G's" (Bela R. Balogh and Gabe Leavitt/3 Leg Torso)
"Stay Golden" (Au Revoir Simone/Moshi Moshi Records)
"Mirrors" (Crocodiles/Fat Possum Records)

SPECIAL THANKS: Coburn Dukehart; Jeffrey Silberman/Fashion Institute of Technology
Published December 2, 2013
This site is a product/service of NPR. Use is governed by NPR's terms of use and privacy policy.

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We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt. We wanted to make an ordinary shirt like the vast majority of the shirts sold in this country - not organic cotton, not hand-sewn in the United States.

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This multimedia report features a 20-minute video documentary and long-form text. If you are short on time you might choose to either watch or read. Alternatively, sit back for an in-depth insight into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forcibly relocated for the world's biggest water transfer. This project was produced in collaboration with ChinaFile, a project of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Like so many of Mao's pronouncements, it sounded simple. "The South has a lot of water; the North lacks water. So if it can be done, borrowing a little water and bringing it up might do the trick." Four decades later Mao's vision has been brought into focus as China's most ambitious engineering project - a scheme to bring some 45 billion cubic meters of water, mostly from the Yangtze and its tributaries, up to the north China plain to Beijing and surrounding parched farmland and factory towns. The central route of the project began carrying water from Hubei to Beijing in late 2014, and, like so many of Mao's plans, it has left a swath of human devastation in its wake.

Most environmentalists see the South-to-North Water Transfer Project as a necessary, though not sufficient solution to the severe water shortages suffered in China's capital and surrounding areas - a situation that owes much to weather and climate - but which has been compounded by the over-damming of the region's rivers and the severe pollution of its already small supply. Without comparably ambitious plans for regulation and conservation, experts like Ma Jun have been saying for more than a decade, those 45 billion cubic meters are just a drop in the bucket.

What are the direct human costs of the transfer? Who has won, and who has lost? On the short end of the stick are the people who live in the areas giving up their water, who, have had to leave their homes, find new work, leave behind community and family, and fathom how their lives fit into the grand and ambitious plans their leaders have devised to solve a nation's problems. - Introduction by Susan Jakes

On a rainy evening in September, the fisherman Cao Suizhou, his hand on the diesel engine, steers his small motorboat by sightline of the shore. There are no stars visible above, nor lights from homes along the boundary of the water.

This is not a natural lake, but a vast manmade reservoir-and the site of ongoing controversy and clashing ambitions in central China. The Danjiangkou reservoir-created by the damming of a major Yangtze River tributary in the late 1950s-was expanded in 2011 so that it now holds 30 billion cubic meters of water, which now runs from the artificial lake to Beijing through an open concrete canal 790 miles long, comparable to the full length of the state of Texas.

The channel, known as the central leg of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, was built as a lifeline to supply water to China's dry and populous northeast. Four-fifths of the country's water naturally flows through the south, yet the burgeoning capital, two-thirds of China's agricultural land, and much of the country's heavy industry are in the parched north. In the northern plains, over-pumped and dwindling aquifers already endanger the nation's breadbasket. The channel brought some relief when its water began flowing through Beijing's faucets about a year ago.

But the ambitious project, first conceived in the 1950s by Mao Zedong, has also transformed the lives of those in the region from which water was taken-a disruption of a far greater extent than planners anticipated, or admit today.

According to figures published in state media, around 340,000 people were relocated before the rising waters of the reservoir flooded their homes. However, interviews last fall with residents and a mayor in the region upstream of the dam reveal that many more were forced to move-perhaps more than half a million, according to the mayor of Xichuan, a county seat upstream of the dam in Henan province. Moreover, since 2003 when the central leg of the water-diversion project was green-lit, crucial streams of investment in infrastructure and business have all but drained from the upstream region-a swath of Henan, Hubei, and Shaanxi provinces that is home to about 17 million people -leaving behind a landscape of potholed roads, unmaintained schools, and closed factories and mines. "There is no long-term plan for economic development there because they always knew the water-transfer project was coming," says Zhang Kelou, an accountant in Henan's provincial capital; his clients have included Zhengzhou-based owners of shuttered mines and industries operating in the upstream area.

When Cao's little craft docks on the muddy shore of the reservoir, two friends help him unload a half dozen Styrofoam crates of tiny silver fish, the evening's catch. As a light rain grows stronger, Cao straps a flashlight to his straw hat and the small team works quickly in the dark to haul and pack the crates into a waiting truck.

For most of his life, Cao, now in his mid-50s, lived in a small village near the shoreline. Before the water level surged, most of his neighbors boarded chartered buses bound for Xin Caowan (or New Caowan), a "relocation village" of government-built housing a hundred miles away; now all that remains of their former home is a crumbling stone water tower and a nearby field of unmarked graves. Cao's wife, Jia Gailan, moved to New Caowan in 2009 and now looks after their two young granddaughters there, but she says that most migrants have struggled to find new work and many complain of poor quality soil and land.

Meanwhile, Cao was determined to continue fishing. "It's the only life I've ever known, the only thing I know how to do," he says, adding that he is too old now to be hired for factory work. With no fixed home, he sometimes sleeps in his boat, sometimes stays in a nearby village with friends there who are among the last to remain in their homes. It is a precarious existence: New government regulations expected to be enforced within the next year will prohibit the kind of fish-farming in wooden cages on the reservoir that brings in most of his income.

Past midnight, the fish truck bumps along a rough road of gravel and mud; there are no streetlights here. Cao, typically at work before dawn, has been fairly lucky, compared to many. He found a way to continue fishing and has made enough money to support his family, including his granddaughter's treatment for lymphoma. But if fishing on the reservoir is soon banned, can he reinvent himself again? Cao isn't sentimental, but he doesn't have a plan for the future, either. "When I get old, what can I do if I get a disease and have no money? I can only wait to die."

In a country of 1.4 billion souls, sweeping national policy decisions invariably disrupt lives, lifting some industries at the expense of others, privileging some regions over others, and forcing millions of people to adapt. In the case of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, it's too soon to assess the final legacy-and whether the painful trade-offs will be worth it. But one thing is already clear: even the diverted water will only quench Beijing's thirst for so long.

Danjiangkou dam, the concrete edifice raised to create the water diversion, is now an unlikely tourist attraction, with a forlorn holiday hotel situated opposite the compound's front gate. For a modest entrance fare, visitors can ride an open cart across the top of the dam, stopping for "scenic" photos.

Looking north toward the reservoir, the view is almost pastoral: a muted canvas of green and brown. Nothing has been built here for more than a decade, and much of what had previously been built, like Cao's village, has since been torn down. Turning in the opposite direction, the contrast is stark. Downstream unspools the usual cacophony of Chinese development: apartment buildings, shopping malls, construction cranes, and even a Ferris wheel, all signs of haphazard economic life.

Tour guides in hard hats present the dam as an engineering marvel-a testament to Chinese modernization and the state's ability to tame the natural landscape. Yet, a different story of the dam's history and long-term impacts comes from Pei Jianjun, mayor of Xichuan, the county in the western Henan province in which the reservoir and the canal head are located.

Once, Xichuan was the seat of a powerful regional kingdom, the Chu, as bronze relics on display at a municipal history museum attest. But today, it is an economically depressed area, and there's nothing grand about the dilapidated downtown: City Hall is flanked by small fenced yard used as a chicken coop.

Pei says his family has lived in the region for 700 years. During different stages of the dam's construction and subsequent raising (spanning more than 50 years, from the 1950s until 2011), different sets of his relatives were evicted on six separate occasions. "The first time that I remember was when I was seven years old," he recalls, waving a cigarette after lunch.

He has collected first-hand accounts of several families in his book, Century Migrants, an investigative history of the long-term social impacts of the Danjiangkou dam construction.

Most recently, beginning in 2003, local officials fanned out to inform the latest round of families, Cao's included, that they would have to move for another dam raising. Unlike in the past, the aim was not blunt eviction, but rather to cajole residents into consenting to the inevitable. By the standards of the past, the most recent expulsion was the most humane: With money from the central government, local authorities at least attempted to compensate migrants for lost land and property.

But whether reimbursement schemes were enacted fairly or disastrously varied greatly across the region. After examining the petitions of 248 migrant families in Xichuan in 2012, Feng Hu, a local prosecutor, compiled the most common grievances: shoddy home-building quality, smaller or less productive plots of farmland, fake residence permits, difficulty finding new employment, and compensation payments swallowed by local corruption. Cao's wife, Jia, adds another complaint: more severe pollution near her new home. "I can't sleep well in the new village; the air quality is not good," she says. "I don't like to use the local water for tea, because there's a lot of contamination." In other relocation villages, as Kathleen McLaughlin has reported in the Global Post, the farmers' mandatory contributions to their new homes have left them deeply in debt.

Ironically, stringent measures were enacted near the reservoir itself to protect its water quality. Mayor Pei says that 238 factories in and near Xichuan were shut down. Following directives from the central government, hundreds of local mines were also closed to prevent pollution from leeching into water bound for Beijing. Meanwhile, to prevent agricultural runoff, farmers in the catchment area are banned from spraying chemical fertilizers or pesticides (though the level of enforcement remains unclear). While the natural environment has noticeably improved, says Pei, new job opportunities have not replaced those lost from the shuttered brick factories and paper mills. He estimates the direct economic cost to Xichuan to be 800 million RMB annually, a hefty price for a small county.

Pei stresses the extent of the region's sacrifice for the sake of a national project benefiting Beijing, including, he says, some 500,000 displaced people, as well as broad economic set-backs to the area as a whole. However, the mayor states, at least on the record, that he is not pessimistic about Xichuan's future. He hopes that, in place of mining and other polluting industries, that his city can foster "tourism and sustainable agriculture" as eco-friendly economic alternatives. Yet he gave few concrete details about how to make these appealing notions happen.

Not far outside the city, an old farmer was sprinkling pellets from a plastic bucket on rows of green vegetable shoots. The fertilizer mixture was made from bird droppings, he said, adding that it was more effective on certain crops than commercial additives. Yet he continues to spray chemical fertilizer and pesticides on his cornfields, having never heard of the ban Pei mentioned. The man says he is open to new farming ideas, if they work. But so far, neither he nor other farmers nearby reported having been informed of any government program or support for building another, more sustainable future.

Yu Baojiang and Wang Dong'er, an elderly couple, live at the top of a steep hill overlooking the reservoir. They remain in one of the last two occupied houses of another village on the edge of the reservoir emptied out before the dam was raised. The government projected that virtually all their neighbors' homes would be submerged, but that their old brick house would be, narrowly, spared. And so, while most of the villagers were escorted to chartered buses and sent away to relocation sites, they were told to simply stay in what Wang now calls a "ghost village." Today they have less farmland, as their fields were partially submerged, and less company. "Everyone else is gone, and we are so lonely here," says Wang. How strange, she reflects, how much depends upon a seemingly arbitrary boundary: where the water line falls.

What Beijing's planners haven't anticipated is that they may not fully control the water line in the future. Engineering blueprints for the water-diversion project date back more than a decade, but China's climate is rapidly changing, as warming temperatures melt the glaciers that feed all of Asia's great rivers-including the Yangtze. Between 2002 and 2014, Chinese scientists calculate that glaciers in Tibet and Xinjiang shrunk by 13 percent. Rainfall patterns are also shifting, though scientists offer different projections as to how global warming will remap the Asian monsoon. "The weather in China has been changing," as Deborah Tan of the Hong Kong-based consultancy China Water Risk told The Guardian, "... and this is something that is beyond everyone's control."

If the original calculations that central China can afford to divert its water turn out to be wrong, that will also have long-term impacts for Cao and his neighbors. "Water is this fundamental lubricant for urban and industrial growth," says Britt Crow-Miller, a geographer at Portland State University, who conducted doctoral thesis research on the water-diversion project. "If you are transferring water away from your community, you're really transferring [away] long-term opportunity" for agriculture or future industries that depend on access to water. "So, what does it mean for these places that down the road will not have access to adequate water resources, potentially?"

Whether history judges the water-diversion project a saving grace or a supreme folly depends now on whether Beijing and the rest of northern China can use "the time that has been borrowed," as the Beijing-based environmentalist Ma Jun puts it, to significantly increase water efficiency and stem demand in the region. "Now we need to shift our priorities from expansion of the water supply to conservation," he says. "Even if the transfer will help to delay a crisis from coming, how do we use that additional time? We cannot continue the old ways of wasteful and inefficient water use. If we don't use this precious time properly, we could soon face another water crisis."

"There's still a worry that even this water transfer will not be enough to cover up the gaps in the future," Ma warns. In other words, the costly and risky project may only be a band-aid solution. "Before we attempt any future radical projects, we must be sure we have exhausted all the conservation methods possible."

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Like so many of Mao's pronouncements, it sounded simple. "The South has a lot of water; the North lacks water. So if it can be done, borrowing a little water and bringing it up might do the trick."

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The opioid epidemic is devastating America. Overdoses have passed car crashes and gun violence to become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55. The epidemic has killed more people than H.I.V. at the peak of that disease, and its death toll exceeds those of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined. Funerals for young people have become common. Every 11 minutes, another life is lost.

So why do so many people start using these drugs? Why don't they stop?

Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others. But nobody is immune. For many, opioids like heroin entice by bestowing an immediate sense of tranquility, only to trap the user in a vicious cycle that essentially rewires the brain.

Getting hooked is nobody's plan. Some turn to heroin because prescription painkillers are tough to get. Fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, has snaked its way into other drugs like cocaine, Xanax and MDMA, widening the epidemic.

To understand what goes through the minds and bodies of opioid users, The New York Times spent months interviewing users, family members and addiction experts. Using their insights, we created a visual representation of how the strong lure of these powerful drugs can hijack the brain.

Dr. Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, one of the nation's top opioid researchers, said this work brings "an emotional understanding" to the epidemic but "without glamorizing or oversimplifying."

We invite you to share your experiences at the end of the page.

If you or someone you know is struggling with opioid addiction, call 1-800-662-HELP.

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Heroin Addiction Explained: How Opioids Hijack the Brain

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The opioid epidemic is devastating America. Overdoses have passed car crashes and gun violence to become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55. The epidemic has killed more people than H.I.V. at the peak of that disease, and its death toll exceeds those of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined.

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a little bit more

There's so much more to learn from the The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, housed at Indiana University. Archival image researcher Rich Remsberg, whose voice you heard above, has an introductory essay. And historian Eric Sandweiss brings it to life in his book, The Day In Its Color, (Oxford University Press, 2012).

But the most helpful guide to these photos was left by Cushman himself. He took meticulous notes about each and every photograph, filling dozens of notebooks with details about where he was and when. So, for example, we know that the Golden Gate Bridge photo was taken on a cloudless day in September, 1938... and 1953 and 1954... and 1968. You get the point.

Although the bridge, as a recurring image, stays consistent over three decades, the things surrounding it don't. Cushman's cars change. So do his clothes. America evolves before our very eyes - if we're patient enough to wade through hundreds of images in chronological order. New railroads influence commerce, highways connect people and machines replace horses. Cushman saw it happening and, for whatever reason, felt compelled to document history as it unfolded. That's what separates him from the vacation photographer: Why else would someone photograph a smokestack outside of Chicago?

There's a tidy organization to Cushman's photos, but there's also a serendipity. Dig around the archives and you'll unearth lush landscapes, impressionistic florals and self-portraits that, with hindsight, we can describe as brooding.

As Sandweiss explains, Cushman's photographs were mediated by his tumultuous marriage with Jean. He was born in the very small town of Poseyville, Indiana, but married into an established Chicago family. Jean was cousins with John Steinbeck, incidentally; and she came undone after her father's death. From then on, it seems, Cushman's photographs gave him a kind of therapy.

We do the same thing today. We put frames around moments to make sense of them - to make them last. Although these days, it's easy to create 14,500 images in an aggressive week of digital shooting. We capture everything - from birthdays to sunsets to what's for lunch. But Cushman provokes a question: Are we just making noise, or are we really processing the passage of time?

"He's a great reminder..." Remsberg says, "that photography is not a contest. ... It's about being a witness to your times."

So: Are you a witness?
We would love to have your thoughts about these photos, about this presentation, and about your relationship to photography and your time. Please visit The Picture Show blog to leave your comments.
You can explore all of Cushman's photos at your own pace on the Indiana University website.

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Lost and Found : The amazing story of Charles Cushman in full color

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In the late 1930s, color film was pretty rare. But one amateur named Charles Cushman couldn't get enough. Over three decades he shot more than 14,000 photos of an era we usually see in black-and-white -- including one of the first color photos of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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flint michigan zack canepari documentary briana water prom fpd gvrc t-rex 1855

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"Flint is a place" is a cross platform episodic documentary series about Flint, Michigan.

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The shirt on your back: the human cost of the Bangladeshi garment industry

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How did the clothes you're wearing get to you? Guardian journalists trace the lifecycle of the shirt on your back via the teeming workshops of Dhaka, where labour is cheap, factories are cheaper and just going to work can be fatal

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The Most Influential Images of All Time | TIME MAGAZINE

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The Most Influential Images of All Time | TIME MAGAZINE

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An elegant non-linear multimedia project exploring the stories behind 100 influential images.

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Explore perspectives.
Select three to see a custom video.

Start your own conversation

Add a question or use one of the submitted questions to start a conversation with your social network. (Note: The n-word has not been filtered from submissions.)

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n-word; donte stallworth; neal brennan; dave chappelle show; nfl; national football leagues bans nword; nfl bans the nword; nigger; nigga; nigger vs nigga; kkk; ku klux klan; jay z; oprah;

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The n-word: An interactive project exploring a singular word

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After the National Football League made the controversial decision to ban the n-word on the field this year, a team of Washington Post journalists explored the history of the word, its evolution and its place in American vernacular today.

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Think of Yellowstone as a gigantic pressure cooker, fueled by a massive supervolcano. Water from rain and snowmelt, much of it centuries-old, percolates through cracks in the Earth's crust until heated by molten rock reservoirs deep below. The water then filters upward, eventually finding release in the thousands of geysers, hot springs, and other hydrothermal wonders.

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Think of Yellowstone as a gigantic pressure cooker, fueled by a massive supervolcano. Water from rain and snowmelt, much of it centuries-old, percolates through cracks in the Earth's crust until heated by molten rock reservoirs deep below. The water then filters upward, eventually finding release in the thousands of geysers, hot springs, and other hydrothermal wonders.