What matters more: the leaker, or the leak?
Silicon Valley workers want to inhabit the anti-war, social-justice, mutual-aid heart of San Francisco, but to do so they often displace San Franciscans from their homes.
‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’ That’s known as Murphy’s Law. It’s invoked in all sorts of settings, but its natural modern home is in engineering,...
Werner Schwieger, one of Maxim Leo’s grandfathers, hung out a big swastika banner after Hitler came to power. But he couldn’t get his father-in-law, Fritz, to accept one: Fritz was a...
Why have oppositions in the Arab world failed so absolutely, and why have they repeated in power so many of the faults and crimes of the old regimes?
In the early 1990s, after more than four decades of stringent enforcement, South Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to...
Yasser Arafat is not the only leader whose body has recently been exhumed. South America has seen a wave of exhumations of political leaders who died in debatable circumstances....
The West’s inability to put up a decent counterargument to al-Qaida is worrying.
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on 21 August.
There are any number of paths and initiations into sistema, the liquid mass of networks, corruptions and evasions which has ordered the politics and social psychology of Russian civilisation since tsarist...
Sri Lanka’s authorities are in buoyant mood. As Prince Charles prepares to open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, the Defence Ministry is helping to organise...
When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to...
When Allied and Axis planners began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the economic chaos of the 1930s was uppermost in their minds.
On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis left the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp. A man came out of an alleyway, shot him five times, then walked back down the alley.
It’s happening again. The chairman has called on the distinguished representative of France. But what I’m hearing through a thick curtain of electrical hiss and crackle in the...
None of the stories we’ve been told about Meredith Kercher’s death really works.
I dreamed I was at an event to remember Frank Kermode and then found myself in the dark basement of a London restaurant, or rather a deep cellar adjoining a basement in which some kind of...
The question is not so much ‘Is Big Brother watching?’ but ‘How in hell can it cope?’