Rest of World’s 21 most engaging and popular stories of 2021

Robot dogs that enforce social distancing. Factory workers who’re drawing millions of views on TikTok. And a duo of fact-checkers fighting against a post-truth dystopia. In 2021, Rest of World published over 450 articles from more than 75 countries — and a huge majority of the stories were reported and written by our network of contributors in the places they’re writing about, outside the West.

Here are some of the stories that resonated with our readers this past year. Together, they examine and highlight the complicated, and often surprising, relationship people around the world have with technology.

Thank you for reading us. You will not want to miss what we have in store for you in 2022.

— Anup Kaphle, Executive Editor