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Jul 30, 2015 • Into The Abyss Originally published in Huck One morning this summer I woke at 4am in the spare room of Spencer Murphy’s north London flat. I dressed quickly in the dark, creeping into the kitchen to find Spencer sipping coffee, up an hour already. We quietly loaded bags of camera equipment into the back of...
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Jul 30, 2015 • Marie’s Place Is Empty Originally published in the New Statesman I walk along Fatemi Avenue in Tehran amid the swirling dust of a gathering electrical storm, the tulip-shaped towers of the Hotel Laleh swimming in a heat haze over honking afternoon traffic. I muster a smile for the doormen in peaked caps and gold lanyard...
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Jul 30, 2015 • The Kool Kids Originally published in Huck Ken Kesey was already something of a literary sensation when, in the summer of 1962, Dean Moriarty stepped off the pages of On The Road and into the increasingly strange story of his life. Tom Wolfe, in his seminal book on Kesey’s psychedelic adventures, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid...
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Jul 30, 2015 • Bristol Cream Originally published in the Stool Pigeon Bristol’s Geoff Barrow is a man with many hats. Best known as the third of Portishead most commonly hunched over a bank of electronic equipment, he is also the guy behind lo fi rockers Beak> and sci fi comic book collaborators Drokk (the latter recently released a...
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Jul 30, 2015 • Censoring The Centipede Originally published in Little White Lies Choosing not to watch The Human Centipede 2 when it hit cinemas in September was a simple exercise in consumer rights; harder to avoid was the media furore surrounding the initial refusal of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to certify the movie due to...
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Jul 30, 2015 • The Power Of Verse Originally published in Huck, photography by Spencer Murphy The doors to London’s Central Mosque are open to visitors, but few outsiders cross the threshold to witness Friday prayers. A five-minute walk away, tourists queue to have their pictures taken with a costumed Victorian policeman outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker...
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Jul 30, 2015 • The Kite Runners Originally published in the Financial Times It sometimes feels as though there isn’t much ground being broken by the new wave of outdoor thrill seekers. Kite surfing is arguably little more than self-piloted water skiing; volcano boarding is snowboarding on blankets of ash. Canyoning? Carpet skating? It’s hard to take a step...
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Jul 30, 2015 • Hidden Depths Originally published in the Time Out Adventure Guide Having a fear of being trapped in a cave is no more irrational than being scared of great white sharks or finding bird-eating spiders in your breakfast cereal. That said, I’m genuinely bad in tight spaces; not clinically claustrophobic, perhaps, but scarred for life...
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Jul 30, 2015 • Powder Play First published in the Time Out Adventure Guide, photography by James Mutter There are few dress rehearsals more disturbing than learning to dig your friend from an avalanche. Our guide, Watanabe, shows us how to switch our trackers to search mode before hiding one in the snow and having us converge on...
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Jul 28, 2015 • The X-Man Originally published in Google Think In February 2012 Peter Diamandis took the stage at TED to talk about the subject that informs his new co-authored book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. Following a barrage of bad news images beamed on to a screen behind him – foundering cruise ships, famine...
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Jun 6, 2015 • Hellboy Unbound Originally published in the Stool Pigeon From Jack the Ripper’s back-alley boozers to dungeons that have witnessed centuries of torture, burnings and beheadings, London has more horror per square hectare than most major cities. Strange, then, that our encounter with the elusive spook of UK dance music known only as Zomby takes place...
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Mar 23, 2012 • Girl Power Originally published in the Sunday Telegraph, photography by Spencer Murphy We’ve been speaking barely ten minutes when Sarah Bridges shifts her enormous upper body in the dollhouse dimensions of her chair and clocks a young man, kit bag in hand, framed in the doorway of the Dartford pub she runs with her husband...
