From prisoners’ rights in Australia and America to African refugees in Tel Aviv, here’s my pick of some of the most interesting reads from around the web.

Adam Gopnik writes an eloquent essay in the New Yorker about the injustice of mass incarceration in the US.

While over at Right Now, Rose Carnes writes about overcrowding in Western Australia’s prisons.

Michael Hastings interviews Julian Assange for Rolling Stone.

Media Lens examines the selective outrage prevalent in the Western mainstream press.

‘There was a period when my husband and I were travelling in Egypt on business, and the whole time there Vasya kept saying it was “lost time”. I didn’t understand at all. I thought it would be interesting for a teenager to see another country, to travel. I understood only later that he felt a deep sense of his motherland, and he was homesick. Even in his young heart he felt that he had been cut off from the life of the country.’ Olesya Gerasimenko conducts revealing interviews with the parents of three convicted Russian neo-Nazis.

Zadie Smith has started a project that I’m a big admirer of called Writers Bloc. Smith gathered a team of writers from across the globe to write creative non-fiction stories about universal education, which is one of the eight aims of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) project. There are ten stories in the Writers Bloc series, with tales coming from Palestine, Haiti, Nigeria, to name a few. 

Michelle Chen writes in the Nation about the continuing sexual violence and exploitation faced by women in Haiti, two years on since the earthquake.

Counterpunch reports on the political unrest and anti-government protests in Moscow.

Israel-based journalist Joseph Dana reports on the plight of African refugees in Tel Aviv for Monocle .

Jadaliyya has created an excellent compilation of a year in the life of Egypt’s media, starting from 25 January 2011 till now.