Death Café
Death Café began in 2011, in a living room in Hackney. Since then over 800 Death Cafés have cropped up worldwide. ‘At a Death Café people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death,’ their website declares. A waitress led the way to a dingy upper room at Bill’s Café
Acid House: The Bolshoi Ballet
Until recently, Pavel Dmitrichenko was a top dancer in the Bolshoi ballet, Moscow’s most prestigious company. He has now confessed to ordering a man to throw sulphuric acid in the face of the ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, in January 2013. Even more shockingly, 35% of Russians polled
Behind Closed Doors: The Truth About Oxfordshire’s Detention Centre
Six miles from Oxford, in Kidlington, a motley band of radicals get together every month to protest outside Campsfield House, an ‘immigration removal centre’. This bland, bureaucratic terminology obscures the building’s malign purpose: keeping detainees against their will. Unlike the inmates o
Julia Kristeva: An Intellectual Rebirth
In a recent talk on the subject of French Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky asserted that “France is an extremely insular culture… everything is in France; nothing is anywhere else”. He noted the particular status accorded to the French intelligentsia: “French intellectuals tend to be media st
Flesh-Eating and Fetishes: Doing Justice to the Reasonableness of Cannibalism
It sounds like the beginning of a distasteful joke. What do a petty criminal, a Swedish professor, a porn star, and a room full of auctioneers all have in common? The truth, however, is far from humorous: all of them have consumed human flesh. The subject of cannibalism rose to renewed prominence th
Playing Home: How Flatpack Furniture is Changing China
Families sit around dining tables eating out of take-away boxes; a suited businessman taps away at his laptop and rests his feet on a coffee table; an exhausted young mother lies sleeping, tucked into a duvet. Snapshots of everyday Beijing residents getting on with their lives. Except these people a
In a Silent Way
In the Tora Bora of Afghanistan, American soldiers played death metal at the entrances of caves, in a bid to prise out Al-Qaeda fighters. Sometimes they sent F-16s to fly low – earsplittingly so – over enemy camps. Or they used music for interrogation purposes – blitzed prisoners with sound, o
Mass Hysteria: A Cult of Mystery
July 1518 lives long in the memory of the people of Strasbourg. At the height of a hot summer a distraught French peasant stepped out onto the street, and spontaneously and fervently began to dance. In what must rank as one of the strangest social phenomena in history, she was soon joined by over 40