Reportage

New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains multitudes: it contradicts itself, wantonly. Any attempt to summarise will fail. Not even Craig Taylor’s delightful cacophony of voices, dozens and dozens of them spilling their New York stories, can compass its vastness and variety. But what a tasty slice Taylor serves up! Until you can fly into JFK and see, hear and smell for yourself, savour the grit, sweat in the choking humidity and shiver in the canyoned midtown winds — until then, his New Yorkers is just the ticket. This is Taylor’s second anthology of urban voices. It

For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or second richest, as he and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos whirr back and forth in top spot), but acts online like a bratty teenager astonished by his own intelligence. He proposes underground tunnel networks as a transport solution for Miami (which is a swamp less than 10ft above sea level), moots takeovers of his companies with 420-themed weed jokes and hypes cryptocurrencies. Yet as you read Liftoff you can see what so many people find to admire in the man — at least for a while. The story of SpaceX’s early

Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover — a glamazonian stewardess, her mirrored cat-eye sunglasses reflecting a runway — promised a Mad Men-era history of silver service and highballs at 30,000 feet, glamour, frocks and sexual shenanigans. Admittedly, deprived of the quixotic delights of a Ryanair snack pack shared with a fractious toddler on a delayed 5 a.m. flight to Alicante at the moment, I ignored the subtitle: ‘The Women of Pan Am at War and Peace.’ That sets the tone more accurately. This is a fairly serious-minded social and geopolitical history of Pan Am, 1966-1975, which takes

When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just one or two regions, would grind to a halt, for most of us it is anything but a fond memory. But the traders of Glencore probably remember the time differently: they saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to cash in. Anticipating a global slowdown, they bought up all the space they could to store oil, including tankers capable of holding 3.2 million barrels. When the markets caught up with the scale of the pandemic, the price of oil dropped to zero and below, and in they swooped. They took the

In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel, a loquacious Turkish civil servant who tells her that ‘the only good thing about a border is that you can cross it’. These words speak to an inherent contradiction. Borders stand as overt manifestations of national power. They represent what seems most fixed and immutable about the state. But in reality, what they do more than anything else is invite transgression. This idea that borders are not quite what we perceive them to be is the thematic ballast for Klaus Dodds’s impressive and timely Border Wars. And it is a

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society. In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived

Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed into the mesh of undergrowth. This was the site of Ducker, the open-air swimming pool that once belonged to Harrow School. Here the young Winston Churchill romped (naked, since trunks were for prefects), as, in his day, did my dad. When I arrived at Harrow in the 1980s, the pool — far bigger than Tooting Bec Lido, which is now the UK’s largest — had just been abandoned. It was covered with graffiti, the haunt of skateboarders. Returning in 2021, I looked for changes wrought by three decades of neglect.

‘Free Tibet!’ used to be a rallying cry for Hollywood A-listers and rock stars. Richard Gere hung out with the Dalai Lama; the Beastie Boys organised a series of giant benefit concerts. Global attention has shifted to other regions suffocating under the jackboot of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), notably Xinjiang and Hong Kong. But the Tibetans’ fight for freedom continues — though only just. Since 2009, 156 Tibetans have set themselves alight in protest at China’s repressive policies. Nearly a third of them are from Ngaba, a small county on the south-eastern edge of the vast Tibetan plateau. Ngaba (pronounced Nabba and known as Aba in Chinese) is home

In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never Pitch Any of These Things to Us Again’. Among a list of no-nos that included burlesque dancing and art made of bodily fluids was the principality of Sealand. They wrote: OK, so an independent sovereign state floating just outside the UK sounds great, right? Except, well it’s not really, is it? I mean, it’s not an independent sovereign state like, say, France. It’s more like a big, floating turd of mental illness in the North Sea. Unsurprisingly, Dylan Taylor-Lehman, the American author of this doggedly respectful account of how an

As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead, this timely book explores one of the few dividends to emerge from such a terrible conflict. Large areas of the country were isolated by the war, and so spared the ravages of modern development. Unlike neighbouring Ecuador, where oil and gas exploration has done its worst, Colombia still has an essentially roadless expanse of pristine forest nearly the size of France. When I travelled in the mountains near Cali last year, I was struck by how depopulated the rural areas were. The peasant farmers, the campesinos, were only slowly returning

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody believed Noah until it was way too late. Bunker: Building for the End Times, a hybrid of reportage and philosophical musing, considers contemporary survivalist culture in all its manifest craziness, from the doomsday realtors who sell bomb-proof, virus-free bunker space to the Bible-belt survivalists who pack their INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home) and bug out to bunker encampments in Wyoming in anticipation of the Final Judgment. In the modern concrete bunker Bradley Garrett sees an extreme expression of our fear of nuclear, chemical, biological and climatic calamity. Never before

On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a leaflet from the Ku Klux Clan: A foul stench spreads out from the East River and hangs over New York like a pall — the greasy sweat of the Black Races and the Yellow Races of Asia which have invaded the United Nations. It is enough to make every White Protestant American vomit. It ended with a threat: the delegates better stay close to the UN buildings and the ‘brothels of Harlem, and not defile the hotels and restaurants of the White City’. FBI officers investigating the correspondence noted a

The world described in this book is weird enough anyway, but reading about it during lockdown is positively surreal. It’s about VIP nightclubs, mainly in New York, but also in Miami, Cannes, St Tropez or wherever rich people congregate. Ashley Mears is a professor of sociology, as she likes to remind us with references to Bourdieu, Durkheim, Veblen, etc, but mainly she is a very good reporter. The reason she was allowed into the VIP clubs is that she used to be a model and can still pass as one, though actually too old for admission (at 31) by most club standards. But it amused some of the promoters to

This book could not have been published at a better time — nor, in a way, at a worse time. Better, because we are now living with the threat of disaster looming over us and society is being radically transformed; worse, because the apocalyptic scenarios Mark O’Connell writes about include such quaint, marginal topics as catastrophic climate change, nuclear devastation and the concern of ‘preppers’. These are the men who build bunkers in the countryside and fill them with enough tins of protein sludge to keep them going through whatever unspecified calamity brings about the end of the rule of law. There’s not a great deal here about a global

John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can find his interpretative dances punctuating a number of his lectures, which go by such arresting titles as ‘150 Years of the Human Corpse in American History in Under 15 Minutes with Jaunty Background Music’ and ‘Abusing the Corpse Even More: Understanding Necrophilia Laws in the USA — Now with more Necro! And more Philia!’ (Wisconsin and Ohio are, according to Troyer’s eccentric looking and always fascinating website, ‘two states that just keep giving and giving when it comes to American necrophilia cases’.) Troyer’s budding stand-up career has taken a couple

Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt and destabilise our democracies. So the Austrian researcher invented five identities and joined a dozen secretive digital worlds of white nationalists, radical misogynists and jihadi women to explore their networks, their strategies and their recruitment techniques. This sobering book tells the tale of her journeys into a swampy underworld filled with fanatics and fantasists. Many of the people she came across seem like the saddest of losers. She joins a white nationalist dating site — motto ‘Love your race and procreate’ — where people admit they received ‘negative’ feedback on