reportage
More Miami vice
Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange…
Mission to Mars
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
Prepare for take-off
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
The real rogue traders
When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just…
Walls of fear
In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel,…
Cruelty and chaos
Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the…
In the land of the lemur
Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the…
Nature fights back
Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed…
Under the jackboot
‘Free Tibet!’ used to be a rallying cry for Hollywood A-listers and rock stars. Richard Gere hung out with the…
Pirate principality
In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never…
A river runs through it
As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead,…
Gimme shelter
In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…
We want lies
On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a…
The new world rulers
Cory Doctorow on the vast, impersonal forces manipulating our lives
Models and bottles
The spectacular extravagance of the VIP nightclub ‘experience’ could be the last bonfire of the vanities, says Lynn Barber
Prepared for the worst
This book could not have been published at a better time — nor, in a way, at a worse time.…
Dealing in death
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
Plumbing the depths
Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt…
A thousand and one nightmares
The Moroccan-born Leïla Slimani has made her name writing novels of propulsive intensity. Lullaby, the story of a nanny who…
The cheapest, deadliest weapon
Nothing prepared Antony Beevor for this devastating exposé of the systematic use of rape in war and ethnic cleansing
Is Tegucigalpa the crime capital of the world?
The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says:…
Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico
You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas,…
Pursuing the perfect scoop
Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the…
A perfect nightmare
Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because…
Soviet smoke and mirrors
‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at…
