Our 9 Favorite Feature Stories This Week: Troll Hunters, A Zen Predator And The Border Security Expo

This week for BuzzFeed News, Jose Orduna meets the men and women who sell technology aimed at keeping Mexican immigrants like him out of America. Read that and these other stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. Tasers, Drones, and Cold Chicken: Inside The Multibillion-Dollar Business Of Keeping Me Out Of America — BuzzFeed News

Charles Ommanney/Reportage by Getty Images

My family emigrated from Mexico when I was young. Now an American citizen, I went to the 2014 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, where the newest military technology meant to target people like us is part of a booming industry. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. The Disappeared — California Sunday Magazine

Illustrations by Clay Rodery for California Sunday Magazine

A must-read story, available in both English and Spanish, by John Gibler about the 43 students who went missing in Iguala, Mexico this fall. "Although it was neither an isolated event nor the largest massacre in recent years, what occurred in Iguala has struck at the core of Mexican society." Read it at California Sunday Magazine.

3. Is A Georgia Prison Trying To Cover Up The Rape Of A Transgender Woman? — BuzzFeed News

Photograph by Matt Odom for BuzzFeed News

Zahara Green’s recent lawsuit against prison officials may reveal how the state is failing to protect transgender people — or even recognize them. Jessica Testa reports. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

4. The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side — The Atlantic

Mark Oppenheimer unpacks a sex scandal and its ramifications in the wider American Buddhist scene: "The many Zen Buddhists inclined to side with Eido Shimano will argue that, unlike in Judaism or Christianity, in Buddhism there is no specific sexual prohibition against fornication, or promiscuity, or adultery." Read it at The Atlantic.

5. The Case of the Missing Wage Thief — BuzzFeed News

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed

David Noriega brings the story of a restaurant company that was ordered to pay millions in back wages to mostly immigrant workers — and then disappeared. Such situations are not uncommon. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

6. The Troll Hunters — MIT Technology Review

Photograph by Anders Lindén

Adrien Chen on Sweden's efforts to find and confront its trolls: "It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it." Read it at MIT Technology Review.

7. Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention — Wired

Dirk Fowler for Wired

Mat Honan writes smart things about the future of publishing: "The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives." Read it at Wired.

8. How I Grew Up on the Internet — BuzzFeed Ideas

Summer Anne Burton

Summer Anne Burton recounts her first 20 years on the internet: "I was 11 when I first logged on in 1993 — I’m 32 now — and I’ve spent the ensuing years invested in online communities at least as much as I’m invested in offline ones." Read it at BuzzFeed Ideas.

9. Saskia Sassen's Missing Chapter — Chronicle of Higher Education

Steve Pyke for the Chronicle of Higher Education

Saskia Sassen is a vaunted professor of sociology at NYU. Her father was a Nazi, an SS volunteer, and spent years after the war meeting with Adolf Eichmann. The story of how she's reckoned with that — and the turns this story takes — is stunning. Read it at Chronicle of Higher Education.

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