A recent Wikimedia Foundation blog post described the work of a Chilean collective of journalists who dispense with the noise of “what’s news” and instead use their time and resources to investigate stories and “to begin the narratives of that which we will see in the future as an archive.” What seems like a novel approach actually is a return to the roots of journalism. Especially if you consider that even though journalism is laser focused on now it still ends up missing important stories that are right under our nose.

Two books that I read recently seem like great examples of stories that have been going on for the last 20 years that you likely know little about.

The first book is The Sleeping Beauties And Other Stories of Mystery Illness By Suzanne O’Sullivan. This book is quite disturbing as the author travels the world meeting and treating people who suffer from an array of illnesses. Many of these are what people call “psychosomatic” illnesses, but this carries a stigma that the problem is imagined, or is somehow the fault of the sufferer. What becomes increasingly clear through Suzanne’s work is that these illnesses are inflicted upon people by others in their social context. Sometimes by their own parents who are simultaneously fighting ceaselessly against doctors and governments. The news portion is the section of the book discussing the Havana Syndrome - an embarrassing failure of both the medical and journalistic establishments. Despite the simple fact that there is no plausible means of building a sonic or electromagnetic weapon that could affect only specific people in a building as large as an embassy, the focus of the reporting was on “how could the Russians have done this?”

The second book The Hank Show by McKenzie Funk features an unlikely protagonist: Hank Asher. A Tony Soprano-esque figure who was a drug smuggler and a violent boss but who managed, during his career, to launch what became multi-billion dollar data broker firms no less than three times. It’s a story that anticipates Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs To Us. It explains how sunshine laws were exploited to build the commercial data now aggregated by credit bureaus and sold back to law enforcement. There’s the familiar themes of the hacker ethos, but the most surprising part of this story is that it’s utterly unknown. Hank is like a Forest Gump of the world of PCs, and an impressive array of famous names are there in the book trying to figure how to exploit his technology without ever being associated with or paying him.