Are you Tricky Dick?

Sorry to bang on about the evils of mainstream media, but we can only allow so much space for it in our printed publication. Besides, it’s interesting and important, innit?

Here’s a brilliant six-and-a-half-minute documentary film by Adam Curtis, explaining how “all of us have become Richard Nixon”, that is, paranoid, anxious and terrified of elites:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA]

Travelling Light

As an online companion to the “How to Travel” feature in our pending third issue, our travel correspondent has prepared a New Escapologist Minimalist Packing List.

Of course, the staunchest Minimalist would leave home with little more than passport, money and tickets (“PMT” – a useful mnemonic) but Tim has developed a tried-and-tested checklist that covers all bases.

"The story of broad decline is simply untrue"

Further to my last post and to Brian Dean’s New Escapologist article, I’d like to direct you to two articles from this week’s Economist:

“In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia. Such forgetfulness can be partly blamed on a dominant national press that tends to report the grotesque exceptions not the blander rule. But politicians have connived in this.”Read more.

“crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995 [...] Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say.”Read more.

All being well, New Escapologist Issue 3 will be printed and shipped next week. It’s a hundred-page monster featuring our best writing to date. If you’ve not pre-ordered, you can do so here.