Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, this long read by Ara Rosenthal for WIRED looks at the shocking reaction a local community had to a young reporter searching the Epstein Files for references to his local community. In “A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out”, we learn how Ben Mueller did some searching of the publicly available files and found some concerning connections to the wealthy area he lived in. Then, a person he named threatened to sue.
As Mueller watched the numbers climb, he felt excited but also a little perplexed. “I didn’t really think I was doing groundbreaking journalism,” he says. “I was just like, this is another piece of homework that I have to do today, and I’ve just got to get it done—but also be thorough, because people are going to see it on the internet.”
About a week and a half later, Mueller was home sick with a light fever and cough when the phone rang. It was his journalism teacher, Erin Schneider, with bad news. “This person mentioned in your post is now threatening to sue the district,” she said.
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