It might be one night, or one moment, unpacked. It might be a topic or a person — Me Too, Faustian bargains, mass hysteria, Benny Hill, Al Qaeda — explored anew. It might be the archive of one amazing or horrifying person. It will certainly mostly be material that is not already online. (A lot less is on Google than you think.)
There will be ten issues a year. But all sorts of wonders will shoot more often from those issues, across text, images, video and audio, into your inbox, and in collaboration with the many wonderful publications doing similar work.
The aim is to tell you things you didn't already know. To make stories big again. To find the myths and legends that get lost in the bland corporate churn of algorithms and AI. To talk to the most interesting people about the most interesting things.
Why would we do such an evidently non-commercial thing?
Because the internet is the whole world sprinting in a circle. If you stop someone and ask them why they're sprinting, they'll say: because everyone else is sprinting.
We want to harness the thing we all end up doing as a guilty antidote to that churn: diving very deeply into one story, and following all of its tangents and inspirations to uncover a fascinating world.
We believe that journalism should humanise. It should grant people their dignity, and not seek to shame or judge or convert, but to understand. It should surprise, and delight, and horrify, as life itself does. And it should achieve all of that without ever losing a sense of fun, or taking itself too seriously. We're only telling stories here.
Ravi Somaiya has written for every publication he can think of, and was a staff writer at Gawker, a crime reporter, international correspondent, breaking news writer and media correspondent for The New York Times, produced and presented short documentaries for Vice on HBO and edited and mentored at Columbia Journalism School.
He covered the Boston marathon bombing, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, the London riots, the mass killing in Norway, the Arab spring, the hubris of the tech industry, the collapse of the media industry, killer bears and the strangest exorcism imaginable. He's done investigative work, and broken stories, on Islamic extremist terrorism, disinformation, Wikileaks, the British phone hacking scandal and many others. He also wrote a book about the mysterious death of the second UN Secretary General in the Congo in 1961.
An associate of Donald Trump once (indirectly) threatened to expose that he had not attended a conference he said he was attending. Julian Assange called him “a sleazy hack job”. The right felt his book was racist because it was not positive about the role of colonialism in Africa. The left felt his book was racist because he is the wrong colour to write about Africa in the first place. Nicer (and probably more attractive) people compared him to John LeCarre or Robert Ludlum. His proudest moment was his name appearing for three seconds in an episode of Nathan For You.