The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best stories of 2021 from our premium syndicators, including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Times of London and The New Zealand Listener.
Today we look at how a vaccine is created, magic's greatest card trick, the future of Facebook, Sinead O'Connor vs the media, and leaving behind a conspiracy theory.
A race to save lives
Eighteen months. Half a billion doses in 178 countries. Thousands of lives saved.The scientists behind the Oxford vaccine, Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green, tell Tom Whipple how they pulled it off.
Dr Catherine Green and Professor Sarah Gilbert: 'We decided, if we're going to need it, we're going to need it fast. Let's prove we can do it and how fast we can do it'. Photo / Getty Images
The mystery of magic's greatest card trick
In the late 1940s, British magician David Berglas started refining a trick that came to be known as "the holy grail of card magic." To this day, nobody is certain how he did it.
Decades into his retirement, he has revealed just about every secret in his long, storied career. This includes the time, in 1954, that he made a grand piano vanish in a London hotel banquet room filled with guests. But even now, when the subject of Berglas' famous effect is raised, he remains as cryptic as ever.
At 94, the magician David Berglas says his renowned effect can't be taught.
To this day, nobody is certain how David Berglas' card trick works. Photo / YouTube
Facebook after the whistleblower: Can Zuckerberg reboot the social network?
In Facebook's early days, Mark Zuckerberg ended weekly meetings by raising his fist and shouting "domination".
On a call with investors in October, the boyish social media titan struck a similarly defiant tone, promising that Facebook would throw its weight behind efforts to lure younger users back to the platform after their numbers had dwindled. He pledged the company would build the "successor to the mobile internet", an avatar-filled virtual world known as the metaverse.
But the chief executive was also swift to address mounting allegations against his company.
Facebook has been facing criticism from its own staff that its 'growth at all costs' culture is damaging individuals and society. Can it recover its image?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo / Eric Thayer, The New York Times
'The media was making me out to be crazy': Sinead O'Connor remembers things differently
The mainstream narrative is that a pop star ripped up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live and derailed her life. What if the opposite were true?
