Editorial.
Extra extra. Read all about it.
I’m a regular contributor for several web and print publications, including Urban List, Frankie, Beat Magazine, Red Bull and Adventure.com.
The wine snobs
Don’t let the glass sniffers make you feel inferior: it’s OK to not know heaps about wine. To never have considered that a glass of vino could be ‘cheeky’, ‘flamboyant’ or ‘chewy’. If you’d like to know more about choosing a good drop, and think ‘terroir’ is a type of small dog, this article is for you: our ultimate no-fuckwittery guide to wine.
Being Nakhane Touré
It only takes Nakhane about thirty seconds to drop something weirdly profound. “I’m in Lisbon at the moment. I wanted to be lonely and write some songs, and Lisbon’s beautiful in a post-grandeur, dilapidated, cracking sort of way. There’s something sad about it. Although coming from a country once colonised by Portugal, I don’t know how sad I can be.”
How to fight zombies
It sounds like a scenario designed to entertain overenthusiastic horror fans, but it’s true. Scientists have been studying how humanity might react to a shambling, implacable, brain-hankering zombie horde. Can science devise an optimal Zombie Survival Plan? Or should we all just go to the Winchester, have a cold pint, and wait for all this to blow over?
flight of the damned
It starts in Southbank’s Queensbridge Square. The FLIGHT team give you a boarding pass with your seat number, flight number, and a map of the ‘aircraft’. “You won’t be sitting with your friends or family,” the British guide says, “By the way, does anyone suffer from epilepsy?” Everyone gives a non-committal (but presumably legally binding) shrug.
Turning up the volume
Nice evening in the Punjab, Pakistan. The sun’s going down behind the spires of Badshahi Mosque, settling into a hazy purple twilight, and on the roof of an ice cream parlour in downtown Lahore, two guys are installing a turntable and complicated mixing gear. Down on the streets, the city’s red-light district, Heera Mandi, is starting to flicker...
The well of death
Indian fairs are pretty much like fairs everywhere. Been there, done that, bought the sari. But there’s one building here that stands out. It looks like a low-budget Colosseum, built from rough timber planks with a metal gantry running around the top. From inside comes the angry buzz of a thousand mechanical hornets...
nick offerman finds good work
The first thing I discover about Nick Offerman is that it’s very hard to figure out where Nick Offerman ends and Ron Swanson begins. This might be ridiculous, but he speaks like Ron. The same slow-shuffling gravitas. Words dovetail neatly into one another. Each sentence sounds like it’s been patiently hand-crafted from Birchwood.
BATTLE OF THE ORANGES
The ancient Roman town of Ivrea is like every other town in northern Italy. Tourists come and take pictures of the castle. Old Italian men do old Italian men things, like nap and play draughts. But for three days every February, Ivrea’s quiet, hardworking people gather into nine tribes, don helmets and body armour, and hurl fruit at one another with extreme aggression.
forests that will feed the world
In 1975, Geoff Lawton was 21 years old, surfing with friends on the west coast of Morocco. It was something they did every year. Get seasonal jobs, rent kombi vans, camp on the wild beaches near Agadir and ride the rolling North Atlantic swells. Then one day, the waves went flat. Geoff and his friends decided to head for the mountains.