I have not been to a literary evening in years, and as I find a place in the garden of Franko House on the evening of 25 June—the closing night of a fellowship named for a Ukrainian writer a Russian missile killed three years ago—I am already a little sorry I came.

Then the moderator, Sasha Dovzhyk, opens by explaining that both of this year’s fellowship writers spent three months circling one idea: home. It is fitting, she says, to talk about home in the house-museum of Ivan Franko, a classic of Ukrainian literature. Here we go again, I think. Another manufactured theme, another self-pleased little world that flatters the people sitting in it and says nothing to anyone outside it. I settle in to be bored.

Anna Gruver starts to read

Anna Gruver left Donetsk at 17 and has not been able to go back in the 13 years since. She reads from a text built almost entirely out of what is missing: home as a doll in a velvet dress, still lying, perhaps, in a drawer in her occupied apartment; home as a cemetery she cannot reach to tend her dead.

“Maybe home is testimony,” she reads. “I testify, therefore I have a home.”

Then: “Home is explosion. Explosion. Explosion.”

By now she has tears in her eyes, and so does much of the garden, and so, to my surprise, do I. It hits me like a freight train. I came braced for polite boredom, and instead I am sitting among strangers who are quietly coming apart—and I am one of them.

Gruver says, a little later, that she feels skinless up here, that she cannot hide behind irony, and that home for her is the one place a person is allowed to be seen like that. I sit there thinking about my own home: where it is and what it is. So much for the emotionless man who came to be bored.

The writer they came for

Victoria Day closes the fellowship that INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange runs each year in memory of Victoria Amelina. She was a novelist who founded a literary festival in the town of New York in the Donetsk region, and who, after the full-scale invasion, retrained to document Russian war crimes with the Truth Hounds team.

Her posthumous war diary, Looking at Women Looking at War, won the George Orwell Prize for political writing. Each year, the fellowship brings one Ukrainian and one international writer to her hometown of Lviv for three months.

On 27 June 2023, a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk left Amelina critically injured, and she died days later, on 1 July. The same strike killed 13 people, four of them children.

Explore further

Russo-Ukrainian War. Day 495: Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after a Russian missile attack. 

Opening the evening before the writers spoke, the United Kingdom’s Chargée d’Affaires to Ukraine, Charlotte Surun, gave the official count: the Prosecutor General’s office has recorded more than 200,000 crimes since the start of the full-scale invasion, each one with a person behind it, she said. She quoted a line of Amelina’s that the rest of the evening kept proving: the answer to truth is often more truth.

The two fellows this year, Gruver and the British journalist Lucy Fulford, both arrived at the same subject without planning to. The evening falls almost exactly three years after the missile, in the last days of June that now belong to her.

Home down to a hand in your hand

Olena Stiazhkina, a novelist and historian also from Donetsk and a member of the fellowship jury, says she wants to talk about home like a mad person—from a position of madness, she says, and of mad solidarity.

She does not soften what the warm garden is sitting on. This evening should not be happening, she says, simply because Russia keeps killing the people dearest to us, and the four of them should be on this stage with Amelina, not in her place.

Her old Donetsk home is made of absences now, she says, and what is no longer there shouts the loudest; she keeps wondering where the absent finds such strength for a voice.

Years ago, she wrote that occupied Donetsk looked like a woman who had been raped, a city the municipal crews scrubbed every morning in a kind of compulsion, washing it and washing it raw. When she heard Gruver tell that same lost city, this evening, that she missed it and loved it, she heard it as love spoken to the violated woman. Not everyone can give love to what is filthy, spat on, defiled, wounded, she says. But we do.

Then she follows the madness where it leads. Earlier that day, she walked to Amelina’s grave, and on the way back, she passed the medical university on Pekarska Street, a building she had walked by for years and somehow never seen.

Her father, a Jewish boy who left the antisemitism of Donetsk, studied there in the late 1950s, and she had never thought to ask him how he lived in this city, whether he was happy, whether anyone needed him. On the old facade, she read the words “anatomy” and “histology” in Latin, and she stood there and cried. It was a gift from Vika, she says, because that is how it works.

She traces her own idea of home down to almost nothing. Leaving Donetsk in 2014 with two suitcases, she thought two was a reasonable number for any life; later, a single emergency bag seemed plenty; later still, she understood that a hand held in your hand was enough, and that the hand in your hand was the home. When she thinks about home now, she says, she thinks only about people, and about wonder.

And some of those people are dead. When a shelling ends in Kyiv, she says, her friends text one another, “How are you?” and once it is over comes the second line: “Today it’s not you. All clear.”

Everyone knows where the phrase comes from, and it means that Vika was with them this time. In her own diary, Vika is still alive, and the two of them quarrel—Stiazhkina cannot forgive her for leaving the Book Arsenal festival to drive off with the Colombian writers to Kramatorsk, where she was killed. Sometimes they make up, when Vika lets her know she is there.

The invisible displacement

Lucy Fulford brings an outsider’s view that, she argues, the subject badly needs. She knows displacement from inside her own family: her grandparents were among the South Asians whom Idi Amin expelled from Uganda in 1972, given 90 days to go, and they made their way to Britain and then to Australia, where she was born, a journey she told in her book The Exiled.

Displacement, she says, is the story of our times, certain to grow with war and climate change, and she has watched hostility to migrants harden at home in Britain even as she reports it abroad.

So she came to Ukraine for the part of this war that readers abroad mostly miss. Far more has been written internationally about the Ukrainians who fled in 2022 than about the displacement inside the country, she says: “There’s a general lack of understanding of how disruptive this war has been within the country.”

For three months, Fulford gathered testimony from people forced to move within Ukraine and from those who chose to return. A chapter on how Mariupol is being kept alive in memory elsewhere. A chapter on newsrooms that fled and kept publishing. One on civilian injury and rehabilitation as its own kind of displacement, and one reaching back to Chornobyl.

One interview stayed with her. A former school principal from Mariupol, now a mathematics teacher working with young children, was describing, almost point for point, the story of Fulford’s own displaced grandmother—a maths teacher who became a primary-school teacher after she was uprooted.

Home is people

Yaryna Grusha, who lives in Italy and translates Amelina into Italian, built a home inside a second language out of necessity in 2022, when her parents were under occupation and unreachable, and she had to make Italian readers grasp that she no longer had one.

Her first piece in Italian was about the walnut tree in her parents’ yard, the tree that shaded them all from the heat for years and could do nothing to shield them from Russian bombs. Home, she has decided, is a climate that other people make for you, and most of the people who make hers are in Ukraine.

What keeps surfacing, across all four, is how much of their language for home came from Amelina. Stiazhkina says Vika seemed to have written the dictionary herself, that she already had a word for their Donetsk home before the rest of them could find one.

Grusha says reading Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom in 2017 made her understand that this was allowed: that you could tell the history of a country through one family. She has been writing toward that permission ever since.

Chuprynenko starts to sing

The conversation ends, and the musician Marusia Chuprynenko comes out with a small guitar. She works in what she calls documentary song: at some point, she stopped inventing and began singing only what she lives through. The melodies are plain, sometimes barely melodies at all, more spoken than sung, the same lines circling back on themselves.

She sings in surzhyk, the mixed Russian-Ukrainian speech of the south, and her last song of the night walks through a beautiful city that will not become home. Someone, she sings, has taken all the things she loves and quietly swapped them around.

The wall where she once pinned pictures of the places she dreamed of seeing now has the barrel of a tank against it. At the market where she always paid in hryvnia, they now want rubles. Her own side bombed her music school to kill the Russian soldiers inside it, and she never even loved the school, yet it grieves her all the same.

Russia is wiping her home region off the map, she sings, with the patience of someone embroidering. By the end the song has worn down to a single line, repeated and then breaking off, a heart and a stone trading places.

She has tears in her eyes through almost all of it, and keeps singing. By the end, I have them too, and I am not the only one.

Home will slowly grow, runs the line of Amelina’s that gives the fellowship its name. In the garden, three years almost to the day since a Russian missile killed her, it is doing exactly that—poem by poem, song by song, among the people who loved her and the ones only now finding her. Including the one who came to be bored.

For months, Russian forces have cordoned off the occupied town of Oleshky. They have blocked roads and emptied pharmacies, all while mining the area. In June, a food truck ran over a landmine at the edge of town, killing a man bringing in aid. Up to 6,000 Ukrainians are still trapped in Oleshky and neighboring villages, more than 180 of them children. The last grocery store shut in January, and for stretches this spring no food reached the town at all. 

Ukraine has seen this before. In its siege of Oleshky, Russia is reviving methods Stalin’s regime used against Ukrainian villages in 1932 and 1933: branding villages "hostile," cutting them off from supplies, barring the starving from leaving, and letting hunger kill the population. That famine—the Holodomor—killed millions. 

Yet as it besieges Oleshky, Russia says the Holodomor never happened. Moscow has dismissed the Holodomor as Western propaganda, rewritten its schoolbooks to blame the famine on the weather, and in occupied Ukraine has torn down the memorials to its dead.

Russia rewrites history in another way too: banning scholars. On 5 January 2026, it barred 28 Canadians from the country. Among them were 16 scholars of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. At the time, they were working on a course about the famine Russia denies.

They released it anyway. Seventy-seven days after the ban, Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine went live on Coursera—13 free modules, built by HREC at the University of Alberta.

What was the Holodomor?

The Holodomor—"murder by starvation"—was a man-made famine that struck Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Scholars generally put the death toll at around 3.5 million; some figures go up to 7 million. Most died in the winter of 1932 and the spring and summer of 1933, as Soviet collectivization emptied whole villages.

The 1932 harvest was poor, but Soviet policy turned shortage into catastrophe. Stalin's government set grain quotas the farmers could not meet. Brigades entered the villages and seized what was left, killing those who resisted. Authorities blacklisted villages that fell short, sealing them off from the outside world. When peasants tried to flee to less famine-stricken parts of the USSR, a draconian passport system trapped them inside Ukraine.

One Ukrainian photographer left the famine its starkest visual record. In the spring of 1933, Mykola Bokan shot a near-daily record of the Holodomor from inside his own home in the Chernihiv Oblast. One photograph shows his family at the dining-room table, beneath his caption: "300 days without a single piece of bread to have with our meager lunch!"

Three months later, his son Kostiantyn, one of the gaunt figures in the image, was dead. On 10 July 1933, Bokan gathered his surviving children around a smaller table, a framed portrait of Kostiantyn between them. The caption reads: "Remembrance for Kostia, who died of starvation."

Bokan was arrested for "counter-revolutionary activities." The photographs were among the evidence. He died in the Soviet camp system. His pictures sat in a secret police archive until researchers found them in 2007. They are now part of Famine as Genocide’s evidence. 

Ukraine commemorates the Holodomor each year on the fourth Saturday of November, with a national minute of silence at four o’clock in the afternoon. 

The permanent damage the deniers have to explain away

Russia’s denial now has to contend with a growing body of evidence—including the famine's mark on the bodies of people born long after it ended. 

For decades, the Holodomor was usually told as a story of starvation. The Soviet archives remained locked until the early 1990s, preventing people from obtaining an accurate picture of the Soviet famine. Before that, scholars studying the Holodomor worked from the memories of émigré survivors and the cables foreign diplomats sent to their home countries in 1932-33.

That picture has changed. “Thanks to the amount of research done over the past twelve years, there is now a field called Holodomor studies,” Marta Baziuk, The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium’s (HREC) executive director and one of the course’s builders, told Euromaidan Press. 

HREC’s course broadens that view by tracing the famine’s epigenetic legacy — its lingering physical and psychological effects — among survivors and their descendants.

Research into other man-made famines, especially the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II, informs this part. In the winter of 1944, German forces blockaded the western Netherlands and cut food supplies to civilians. A 2026 study groups Holodomor descendants with Dutch Hunger Winter and Holocaust survivors, pointing to shared histories of famine, mass deprivation, and inherited trauma. 

Children conceived during the famine showed lasting epigenetic changes. Over sixty years later, the generation affected by famines showed accelerated biological aging and elevated risk of diabetes and heart disease compared to other generations.

Researchers studying three generations of Holodomor survivor families have found stress, mistrust, and food hoarding in grandchildren who never went hungry themselves. They describe it as “living in survival mode.” 

"Russia’s war has made Ukrainian history important to a lot of people. This course might’ve been good before the war, but it would have sat quietly, with less interest." — Baziuk

The targeting of Ukrainians shows up in Soviet death records, Baziuk told Euromaidan Press. Even outside the Ukrainian Soviet republic, and even in mixed villages, ethnic Ukrainians died at noticeably higher rates than their neighbors.

The Executed Renaissance

HREC’s course does not treat the Holodomor in isolation. It situates the famine within a broader Soviet pattern of repression against non-Russian groups, in which physical destruction and material deprivation went hand in hand with the stifling of all culture hostile to Stalinism. 

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," called the Holodomor the classic example of “Soviet genocide” in 1953. To him, the famine was one prong of a wider assault on Ukraine’s cultural figures, clergy, the peasantry, and Ukrainian national identity through resettlement with non-Ukrainians.

Over the course of the 1930s, Soviet security services arrested, deported, or executed roughly 30,000 Ukrainian writers, scholars, and clergy.

Ukrainian cultural figures flourished in the 1920s, as the Ukrainian language was more widely promoted, only for Soviet authorities to murder them in the 1930s. Today, Ukrainians remember that generation as the “Executed Renaissance.” 

Many of those killed were themselves committed Communists. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks had little organic support in Ukraine. They had recruited young, idealistic Ukrainians by promising room for a Ukrainian version of socialism.

Korenizatsia, the Soviet promotion of non-Russian nationalities, had once promised room for Ukrainian culture. Stalin’s Great Turn — the Soviet regime’s late-1920s drive toward forced collectivization and rapid industrialization — crushed that opening. Ukrainian national communists became, at best, relics of a discarded future, and at worst marked for death.

Russia’s present war follows a similar logic. Ukrainian writers are again being killed, as they were in the 1930s. In 2022, Russian forces seized the children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko near Izium. He is among the more than 100 cultural figures killed by Russia, according to PEN Ukraine. 

In Russian-occupied territory, churches not part of the Moscow Patriarchate have been closed, seized, or destroyed. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have also been forcibly transferred to Russia, where they are to be brought up as Russians. Moscow’s abduction of children has formed the basis for the ICC arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. 

Forget what you’ve seen: Soviet-era denial of the Holodomor

Soviet denial began while Ukrainians were still dying. When the International Red Cross offered famine aid, Moscow refused, denying that mass starvation was taking place. Even as Ukraine’s villages became open-air morgues, Soviet ships carried Ukrainian grain out of Odesa for sale on foreign markets.

In March 1933, a young Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones went from village to village in Soviet Ukraine, recounting what he saw:

"There is hunger almost everywhere. Millions die from it. I travelled for several days in Ukraine, and there was no bread. The children had stomachaches, all the horses and cows were dying, and the people were also dying of hunger. The terror was on an unheard-of scale." — Gareth Jones in a letter to his parents, March 1933

For his trouble, Jones was mocked by name in The New York Times. NYT’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, responded to Jones in print, denying that any famine existed.

Duranty received more acclaim than Gareth Jones in his lifetime, receiving a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The Times has since disavowed his coverage, calling his Soviet dispatches "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Nevertheless, NYT has yet to return the award.

Jones was banned from the USSR and shot dead two years later in Inner Mongolia, in northern China. He did not live to see his findings vindicated.

Russia’s denial today

Following in Soviet footsteps, Russia continues to whitewash or deny the Holodomor. In 2014, Kremlin-backed outlets called it a “hoax invented by the West’s propaganda machine.” Since 2023, Russian school textbooks have blamed the famine on poor harvests and local mismanagement rather than the Stalinist policies. 

Asked about intent, Baziuk did not treat it as a difficult question. The archives, she says, show Soviet officials knew people were starving and kept selling Ukrainian grain abroad as they died. 

Beyond intimidating scholars, Russia's denial extends to physical destruction. On 19 October 2022, occupation forces in Mariupol dismantled the monument to victims of the Holodomor and political repression near the destroyed Drama Theatre, where up to 600 Ukrainian civilians were killed by a Russian airstrike. The granite, officials said, would be turned into construction materials.

In November 2023, Russian-installed administrators in occupied Kherson Oblast began demolishing Holodomor memorials in Nova Kakhovka and the Oleshky community. They called the memorials "a tool for manipulating history," artificially created to incite hatred toward the Russian Federation.

Echoes of the Past: Russia’s Starvation of Oleshky in 2026

Russia’s destruction has not stopped at memorials. 

In a 25 June report, UN monitors who interviewed residents recorded at least 29 civilians killed this year in Oleshky and neighboring villages, most by FPV drones. No food had reached Oleshky since 26 May. A few of Oleshky’s trapped residents escaped through ad-hoc volunteer runs, including 32 people during a three-day lull in the shelling. Others could not be moved at all. 

One woman’s husband stayed behind with his 84-year-old father, who could not walk the ten kilometers to the meeting point. 

Russian forces imposing these conditions, the monitors noted, are legally bound to feed the town they occupy. 

The Soviet state followed the same logic, cutting off villages that missed grain quotas and barring peasants from leaving Soviet Ukraine in search of food. 

Ninety years on, Russia is doing it again in Oleshky. Parliament Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets calls Russia's siege deliberate terrorism. 

Oleshky’s exiled administration describes what that means in practice: the dead buried in plastic bags, sometimes marked only with a name and two dates. One man who died in December lay unburied for nearly two months. 

Concerning Oleshky, Oleksandr Prokudin, head of Kherson Regional Military Administration, told Censor.NET that Russian forces have “created a situation there akin to the Holodomor." The historical parallels are not lost on Ukrainians.

While much of the media industry focused on the churn of headlines, we became increasingly interested in the undercurrents beneath them: the hidden systems, infrastructures and ideologies shaping events across borders and over time.

Again and again, our reporting led us back to the same realization: for a long time, the struggle over information was understood primarily as a question of censorship or access. Who controls information? Who gets to publish? Who gets silenced?

Those questions still matter. But they no longer fully describe the world we live in.

Today, the struggle over information is about who builds the systems through which reality is organized, distributed and trusted. From state propaganda to algorithmic feeds, from platform monopolies to AI-generated noise, the battle is not over facts. It is over the infrastructures that determine which narratives spread, which voices are amplified and which communities remain connected.

Over the past year, these questions led to a collaboration between Coda and The Continent, the pan-African newspaper founded in Johannesburg by Simon Allison and Sipho Kings. Although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.

This two-chapter essay is the beginning of that collaboration, and marks the start of a new project called The Atlas. Pilot edition is available here — please feel free to share with friends, family and colleagues, preferably in its entirety.

In Chapter One, I return to the world of my Soviet childhood: propaganda, samizdat and the search for trustworthy signals through noise.

In Chapter Two, The Continent co-founder Simon Allison presents the Parable of Sinn Sisamouth: the story of how some of the greatest songs ever written were nearly lost, and then found, and then lost again. 

Taken together, these essays ask what journalism becomes in a world where information is no longer organized primarily to inform, but to capture attention, manufacture reaction and shape perception at planetary scale.

The Atlas grows out of that question.

Chapter One: Through the Static

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of civil war. We didn’t use the term back then, but fake news was all we got through official channels. Real news — coming from the West — felt like a lifeline. I was in awe of the crackling radio that held my mother’s full attention. I wanted to become that voice.

Years later, I got my dream job at the BBC and spent much of my adult life moving between wars, uprisings and authoritarian states. Again and again, I found myself in places where truth was contested terrain: Baghdad, Damascus, Donetsk, Sana’a. But over time I realized something fundamental had changed. Modern authoritarianism no longer relied primarily on suppressing information. It had discovered something more effective.

Information could simply be drowned out by static.

That realization became stark for me in eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. I arrived in a field of bright yellow sunflowers where the bodies from Flight MH17 still lay scattered across the ground. A Russian missile had blown the passenger plane out of the sky, killing all 298 people on board. Yet almost immediately, the Kremlin flooded the information space with competing explanations. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet. A failed assassination attempt on Putin. The plane had been filled with corpses before takeoff. Each theory contradicted the next, but that hardly mattered. The point was not to persuade, it was to exhaust. It was to create so much noise that truth itself began to feel unstable.

Over the following years, I watched versions of the same logic spread far beyond Russia. Social platforms transformed public conversation into a permanent stream of outrage, performance and distraction, collapsing vastly different kinds of information into the same endless feed. War footage, propaganda, conspiracy theories, journalism and gossip all began competing inside systems designed not to inform people but to capture and hold attention.

Noise became the new censorship.

And increasingly, I found myself thinking about the world of my childhood again. Not because history was repeating itself neatly, but because the emotional landscape felt strangely familiar: confusion, exhaustion, distrust, the constant sense that reality itself was becoming slippery. Back then, people searched desperately for clear signals through the static of Soviet propaganda. Today, we are drowning in a different kind of static, but the instinct, the search for clarity feels remarkably similar.

In the Soviet Union, people developed ways of navigating that confusion. Among my strongest memories from that time is the sound of my parents’ typewriter late at night. Friends would pass around copies of banned Soviet literature and my parents would sit at the kitchen table all night, retyping them page by page so they could be shared again. It was my first encounter with samizdat, although I didn’t know the word then.

Looking back now, what strikes me is that samizdat was never simply about forbidden texts. It was about building trusted alternative systems of circulation when official systems had lost credibility.

At Coda, we have spent years building journalism against the logic of noise. We slowed stories down. We followed themes instead of headlines. We built a reporting system designed to connect events across borders and over time, helping readers see patterns instead of fragments. But as our globally distributed newsroom adapted to an increasingly fractured information landscape, it became clear that journalism alone was not enough. Distribution shapes understanding as much as reporting does.

Around the same time, in Johannesburg, Simon Allison, Sipho Kings and their team were building something that challenged many of the assumptions dominating digital media. The Continent, their pan-African newspaper, spreads largely through direct sharing networks: passed from reader to reader rather than pushed by algorithms.

Different histories had brought us to remarkably similar questions. What does journalism look like when trust is collapsing, attention is fragmented and the systems that carry information have themselves become instruments of power?

Out of that convergence came The Atlas: a new publication that brings together Coda’s methodology of following systems across borders and over time with The Continent’s radically distributed model for reaching readers beyond algorithmic feeds.

The Atlas is built on a shared conviction: as fragmentation, distrust and informational overload spread across the world, some of the clearest ways through will come from places that have already spent decades navigating propaganda, instability and contested reality. Places once treated as peripheral are becoming essential to understanding the defining question of this age: how can meaning survive systems designed to overwhelm it.

Chapter Two: The second silencing of Sinn Sisamouth

Imagine if your favourite song disappeared, forever. 

Almost every album I have ever loved was recommended to me by my friend An-Rui. A few months ago, he sent me a track by the undisputed King of Khmer Music, the Golden Voice, the Cambodian Elvis himself – Sinn Sisamouth.

I had never heard of him.

I didn’t respond at first, so he nudged me. That night, after the kids were asleep, I put on my headphones, sat in the garden and immediately lost myself in Cambodia’s psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. I don’t know enough about music to explain exactly what I fell in love with, but within weeks I was, according to Spotify, among the top one percent of Sinn Sisamouth listeners worldwide.

An-Rui had added a note to his recommendation. “the songs are happy but since i know what his fate was and i don’t understand the words, it sounds incredibly sad to me”.

The story goes something like this: A small-town boy with an extraordinary voice moves to the big city, and conquers all before him. He writes hundreds of songs, bridging Khmer musical traditions with new western influences: jazz, rock & roll, bossa nova, blues, the Beatles, and, of course, Elvis Presley. He toured the country. He toured the world. He made music with an actual King, Norodom Sihanouk, and became Cambodia’s most beloved rockstar.

Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power. In the course of committing a genocide, the communist regime disappeared Sinn Sisamouth, and banned his music. He has never been seen, or heard from, again.

But his music never died. It lived on brittle records, hidden for generations under floorboards. It lived on scratchy cassettes, passed hand to hand among the diaspora.

It was only decades later that his music was digitised and remastered, and made available on streaming platforms to the likes of me.

When I listen to Sinn Sisamouth, I can’t help but think about how easily we could have lost his masterpieces entirely. And I wonder what else might have been lost that we have not been able to recover.

And then it happened again.

There’s a particular track that I like to play in my car, where I can turn the bass up as high as it goes. I was driving one afternoon and looked for it on Spotify. It was gone, even though the rest of the album was there. 

I looked again on my laptop at home. Nothing. Gone from Spotify. Gone from Apple Music. Gone from YouTube. Like it had never been there in the first place. I started to wonder if I had gone crazy, and maybe imagined the song entirely. And then I started to panic: What if I never heard it again?

Eventually, I found a bootleg YouTube version, using a different transliteration of the Khmer title – Kanlang Pnheu Pran, instead of Konlong Phner Bran. Before I tracked that down, I had to wade through dozens of AI-generated Sinn Sisamouth ‘cover versions’, all uploaded to YouTube within the last few months. If I had never heard it before, I would never have been able to tell which was the original.

It’s not unusual for songs to disappear from the Internet, especially when the music is from non-English-speaking countries. I’ve had similar experiences with the music of Sharhabil Ahmed, the Sudanese jazz legend, and Ethiopia’s Tilahun “The Voice” Gessesse.

In fact, it’s not unusual for other kinds of information to disappear from the internet; to be edited after the fact; or to be simply lost among all the digital noise. Digital information is incredibly precarious, and becoming more so by the day. AI slop is taking over social media platforms. Algorithms determine what information we can and can’t see, shaping our cultural and political preferences. And powerful interests are becoming increasingly bold when it comes to brazenly manipulating information in their favour – or, of even greater concern, restricting the flow of information across borders.

Amazon changes the contents of books on people’s Kindles without telling anyone. News websites quietly alter critical stories, post-publication, to remove evidence of wrongdoing (my favourite example: the Financial Express published a story critical of India’s richest family; only to replace it with a glorified press release a few days later. They neglected to amend the URL, however, which contains the original headline). Governments shut down internet access on a whim, or legislate which apps and websites are available to specific populations.

For journalism, this is an existential threat. Our job is not just to hold power to account – it is also to write the first draft of history. But if we can’t preserve that first draft, or distribute it effectively, then what, exactly, is the point?

The Continent and Coda Story are working together to try something different. We want to publish news about the world, produced and verified by humans, that cannot be edited after the fact; and to distribute it in a way that dramatically decreases our reliance on unaccountable algorithms or search engine optimisation. The Atlas — pilot edition available here — is our answer to the precarity of information online. It’s a work in progress.

Stay tuned: if we’re going to succeed, we’ll need your help. And if we do succeed, the secret of our success will be those very same transnational networks that kept the music of Sinn Sisamouth alive. Communities of like-minded people, of friends and families will always find a way to stay connected, no matter how vast the distances between them, or how great the obstacles. So what does a global newspaper look like if we design it with exactly these communities in mind?

As soon as I found that bootleg on YouTube, I ripped an MP3 copy and sent it to An-Rui on Signal. “KEEP THIS SAFE,” I told him. I don’t know what happened to the song on Spotify, or if it is ever coming back. But I can’t take the risk of never hearing that bassline again. And here it is, in case you want to hear it too.

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