Christ Church College in Oxford has been shaken by a management dispute. Photo / 123RF
The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best stories of 2019 from our premium international syndicators, including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Times of London and Harvard Business Review.
Thisafternoon we look at the scandal that rocked the elite Oxford University, social media's role in global protests, why women have more trouble sleeping than men, the bizarre Biosphere experiment and trekking through Mordor.
Scheming spires: The incredible scandal at Oxford University
In December 2017 the dean of the Oxford college of Christ Church emailed one of the people who set his salary. He was already among the best paid clerics in the Church of England but he felt overworked.
From such exchanges has arisen one of the most embarrassing and expensive debacles in the university's recent history.
Leaderless rebellion: How social media enables global protests
The mass protests that have broken out during the past year share important characteristics. They are usually leaderless rebellions, whose organisation and principles are not set out in a little red book or thrashed out in party meetings, but instead emerge on social media.
The lost history of one of the world's strangest science experiments
Biosphere 2 was a 3-acre complex containing a miniature rainforest, a mangrove, a desert and a coral reef — along with seven people who had been sealed inside for a month.
On April 4, 1994, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo broke opens the doors and effectively ended one of the strangest experiments in the history of science.