The Neighborhood You Never Asked About

There’s a particular kind of website that exists only to make you feel worse about people you’ve never met. "Rechtes Land"—Right-wing Country—was one of them: a German project that mapped the known addresses and locations of neo-Nazis and far-right extremists across the country, by name. The premise was uncomfortable in all the right ways. You go through life assuming the people around you are basically harmless, dealing with their own mediocre problems, and then a map quietly places a red dot three streets over. The project made civil liberties advocates queasy and made everyone else feel a grim, complicated relief—which is probably the correct response to learning your neighbor has a documented history with the domestic intelligence service and a folder of literature to match.