Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution --
It's ridiculous; at the height of the unrest reserve officer salaries doubled and everyone was getting huge bonuses all the time [...] Most full-time officers didn't really care what was happening politically on the streets, they were just happy with the extra money. Occasionally though you'd hear guilty jokes about how we were the only people who were benefiting from the revolution and the Egyptian people had been screwed over.
posted by philip-random
on Dec 28, 2011 -
7 comments
2011 in Lego Pictures. From the royal wedding to the death of Osama bin Laden, the English summer riots and the fall of Gaddafi, here are some of major news stories of the past 12 months captured in Lego by Flickr members.
posted by OmieWise
on Dec 19, 2011 -
13 comments
"Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event."
Charlie Kaufman: Why I Wrote Being John Malkovich. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla
on Oct 7, 2011 -
47 comments
A new US-oriented front page for the Guardian online, reflecting a 'new digital operation based in New York'. US visitors to the .co.uk front page will be redirected to .com, but you can choose which version to see at top left.
[more inside]
posted by Segundus
on Sep 15, 2011 -
36 comments
Wikileaks has
alleged that Guardian editor David Leigh negligently leaked the encryption passphrase to the unredacted 'Cablegate' archive in an upcoming book.
The Guardian denies the charges, but states that
"[a] Twitter user has now published a link to the full, unredacted database of embassy cables", potentially putting informants at risk.
posted by p3on
on Aug 31, 2011 -
203 comments
How I Wrote is a series of videos from The Guardian where musicians perform a song after talking about it a little bit. Among the artists who've taken part are
Rufus Wainwright,
Kristin Hersh,
Corinne Bailey Rae,
Laura Marling,
Keren Ann,
Patrick Wolf,
Elbow,
Gruff Rhys,
Warpaint,
Cee Lo Green,
Antony and the Johnsons,
P. J. Harvey and
Emmy the Great, who sings a song about the Royal Wedding, appropriately enough for today (though I suppose the Cee Lo Green song is appropriate too).
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 28, 2011 -
27 comments
Massive leak reveals secret dossiers on 759 captives
The Guantanamo Files
New York Times and
Guardian
(
) For all the sensitive types that can't read actual wikileak files with out having tanks on your lawn or SWAT teams down your chimney, please rest assured that none of my links here or inside lead directly to *sekrets*)
[more inside]
posted by adamvasco
on Apr 25, 2011 -
391 comments
On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. [. . .]
In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission.
"The Man Who Spilled the Secrets," by Sarah Ellison, documents the tumultuous relationship between
The Guardian and
Wikileaks.
posted by Weebot
on Jan 15, 2011 -
136 comments
Twelve Tales of Christmas is a podcast
just launched by The Guardian featuring notable modern authors, such as Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Colm Toíbin and Julian Barnes, reading one of their favorite short stories, by authors including JG Ballard, Katherine Mansfield, Italo Calvino, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. A story will be posted daily for the next 12 days. The first author and story is
Philip Pullman reading The Beauties by Anton Chekhov (
mp3).
[rss, iTunes]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 10, 2010 -
8 comments
"… if I ever have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his piggish little face – if I have to witness that one more time I'm going to rise up and kill absolutely everybody in the world, starting with him and ending with me.".
Charlie Brooker, the UK Guardian's TV 'critic', calls it quits.
posted by lalochezia
on Oct 15, 2010 -
71 comments
The
Haystack application aims to use
steganography to hide
samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an
unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator
Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as
"on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an
Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project
widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to
mount, Heap has currently asked users to
cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 13, 2010 -
31 comments
Christiane Kubrick, widow of film director Stanley Kubrick,
talks with the Guardian about her marriage to the film director, his lost project about the Holocaust, and his love of the waltz [
via | Flash req'd].
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 11, 2010 -
4 comments
The 2010 Booker longlist is out, and it seems that most of the buzz in the UK is about who's
not on the list. The Guardian article "
Amis-free Booker prize longlist promises to 'entertain and provoke'" introducing the list of 13 nominees actually devotes its headline, subhead, and most of the first four paragraphs to the subject of who's missing in action: Amis, McEwan, Rushdie. Elsewhere in the Guardian Books section, research professor Gabriel Josipovici pulls no punches in including these (former?) darlings of the glitterati in his assertion that
Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, compares them to "prep-school boys showing off," calls them "virtually indistinguishable from one another in scope and ambition," and muses that the fact that they have won so many awards is "a mystery."
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jul 29, 2010 -
50 comments
"For a lot of comics, it's OK to talk about raping women now. That's the new black on the comedy circuit." "One false move, and I'm Jim Davidson." "Don't go thinking I'm the new Bernard Manning. I'm being postmodern and ironic. I understand that what I'm saying is unacceptable."
The new offenders of standup comedy.
posted by permafrost
on Jul 28, 2009 -
168 comments
Erwin James: the real me.
Erwin James has written about prison for
the Guardian for a number of years, from the point of view of an insider: when his column began, he was serving a sentence for two murders. He
completed his sentence a few years ago, but continued to write under that name, a pseudonym.
Here, he talks about the crimes that he was originally imprisoned for, his time in the French Foreign Legion, how he became a writer during his time in prison, and gives his real name for the first time.
posted by chorltonmeateater
on Apr 23, 2009 -
19 comments
