The Federal Bureau of Investigation files on James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Sontag, and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them. Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.

This week, we released improvements to our request download tool so it works better with large requests and improved the language in follow ups. Here’s what’s new at MuckRock and how you can help out.

We’ve been incredibly excited about the early response to the Assignments platform, and we’re delighted to roll out more features to help you launch and manage crowdsourcing campaigns to dig through large document sets.

Help read through thousands of pages covering Brett Kavanaugh’s time working under special counsel Ken Starr, in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush, and more, summarizing and highlight the documents you think are most interesting.

After a year of hard work, our first professionally published book, Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, is almost here! It’s set for release Sept. 18, from MIT Press, so we’re hosting an informal book launch party at The Field on 19th the in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.