“After Macedonia became independent in 1991, though, Veles began to decline. The factories closed; the jobs evaporated. The local soccer team, FK Borec, won so infrequently that it was dropped from the first division to the third. The town’s only movie theater folded a decade and a half ago. Its downtown withered. Briefly, in the mid-2000s, the economy shook itself awake when a few men splashed around money they’d made selling heroin in Germany and Austria, but the police soon broke up that drug ring and Veles returned to its state of morose dilapidation.” And then fake news came to town. Wired’s Samanth Subramanian with a glimpse inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex.

+ Ben Crair: Maniac Killers of the Bangalore IT Department. Why is India obsessed with crimes committed by software engineers?