Power Play: Vučić, Serbia and the West
On a Saturday afternoon in July 2008, Aleksandar Vučić organized a demonstration in Belgrade.15 000 nationalists attended, a small crowd by Serbian standards. They were protesting against the arrest and extradition of Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician implicated in the Serbian g
Soumission by Houellebecq: Satire or Smut?
France has a history of producing bitterly controversial writers: Baudelaire the Sapphic Pornographer, Celine the traitorous Anti-Semite, and Derrida the Obfuscator. Today, that great tradition is embodied in slight, ailing frame of Michel Houellebecq, who is quite possibly the most controversial wr
Attack of the Drones: The Ethics of Modern Warfare
In the good old days, going to war meant travelling to where the war was. Pack your bags, don’t forget your toothbrush, say goodbye. For about five hundred US Air Force pilots, that inconvenience no longer exists. Their war is sedentary, carried out in rooms at Offutt Air Force Base on the line be
“If they see you, they shoot”: An Interview with a North Korean Defector
‘If they see you, they shoot’. Jung tells me about the soldiers stationed every 60 metres along the border he crossed to leave North Korea. ‘My mother was very afraid to leave’ he says, and it is not hard to see why. I meet Jung in a coffee shop in the heart of Seoul, just […]
New Bodies, Old Norms: Transsexuals in Iran
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are clearly defined oppositional concepts. Yet the country is also the world’s second most prolific practitioner of sex-reassignment surgeries. In 1985 Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa stating that transsexuals should be permitted to ch
Video: No Platform for Marine Le Penn?
The ISIS talks about the ‘no platform’ strategy with activists, students and politicians at Marie Le Pen’s Union Speech
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Deep Web
The deep web is often cited as making up 99% of the Internet. It is understood to be a murky, metamorphosing nebula of information in which websites for contract killers and drug lords swirl malignantly. Impossible to navigate without the precise address of your destination, untamed by national laws
John School: A New ‘Cure’ For The World’s Oldest Profession
Cynthia is talking to a room of men about her first husband. She married him for a kilo of crack cocaine, only to, only to discover he was a hit man. While they were married she was shot twice – the second time landing her in a coma for three months. It was then that […]