Vol. 30 No. 7, 3 April 2008
As
good a place to start as any is 19 December 2001. On this date a dozen men, all
foreign nationals, were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations
of the term ‘internment’, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the
government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without
trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights except in
extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave.
- Worst-Case
Scenarios by Cass Sunstein
‘If
there’s a one per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida
build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms
of our response . . . It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of
evidence. It’s about our response.’ The One Per Cent Doctrine: it’s a striking
methodology and a liberating one, and many people think it’s the on ly way to
respond to the threat of low-probability, high-impact events. With it, the
endless evidence-gathering and analysis that characterises traditional
intelligence policy gives way to clarity.
- Life,
in Pictures by Will Eisner
- Epileptic
by David B.
- Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine
- Misery
Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti
The
term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an
empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels
simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to
Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless
piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and
call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’.
Also
in this issue
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