Volume 20 Τεύχος 4
Scientology Hates Psychology, Especially If You're from Taiwan and Living in Australia
Scientology’s hatred of psychiatry and psychology has been well documented, but what happens when one of their members has a breakdown? I spoke to “John,” an ex-Scientologist to find out more.
Meet the Ladies of the Free Syrian Army
Just a few hundred meters from the Turkey-Syria border lies Atmeh, a once quiet farm town that has become a safe haven for the Free Syrian Army. Fifteen thousand Syrians roam freely, displaced by the civil war. There’s also Auntie Mahmoud’s house—a...
Classism
Fun fact: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re probably talking about class. I’d say half of what seems to be racist and sexist and xenophobic is classist and allowed to be because nobody gets into it, and nobody wants to. Classism in...
One Young Druze vs. the Entire Israeli Military
Every able-bodied Israeli has to serve in the military when they turn 18. Exceptions are made for Arab citizens and ultra–Orthodox Jews, but not for the country’s 125,000 Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethnic and religious minority that is primarily based...
The Dutch Love Ecstasy So Much Their Dirt Is Toxic
With its liberal stance on drugs, the Netherlands has been one of the top producers of ecstasy for the past decade. What isn’t going to make you want someone to touch your genitals is that, like all manufacturing, the by-products of illicit narcotics...
Can I Get in the Van?
It dawned on me: Black Flag did not have a bass player. I decided right then and there to find out where Ginn was living, hitchhike across the country, and persuade him to let me try out—just as I had attempted to do at 16.
The Vet Who Wants to Legalize Medical Marijuana for Dogs
Now that it’s possible to legally buy and smoke marijuana in many parts of the US, it’s safe to say that weed and its by-products will be ingested freely throughout the country in the next decade. But have you ever shotgunned a blunt into your dog’s...
Sad on Purpose
'Depression Quest' is a a text-based role-playing game that, according to its website, is “not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience.” Its objective is to simulate the misery of clinical depression, which probably qualifies it as the most...
The New Roma Ghettos
In the last two years, as the Eurozone crisis worsens, Slovakia seems to be scapegoating its precarious minority of Roma—the ethnic group better known as Gypsies. Racist violence, evictions, threats, and more subtle forms of discrimination and...
Meet the Last Lykov
When I asked 70-year-old Agafia, the sole surviving member of the Lykov clan, if she wished that the geologists who discovered her family in the isolated wilderness of Siberia’s taiga forest had never found them, she shook her head. “I don’t know if we...