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26 Sept 2014

The ideal Twitter diet: eat your way to better tweets

As someone who’s on Twitter, I get asked a lot about what’s the best diet to follow in order to tweet successfully. It’s a subject that I have thought about a lot during the past half an hour, and therefore decided to write a guide for people who are too busy to design their own diets. It’s a matter of common courtesy, you owe it to the people who follow you to eat properly in order to keep them informed and entertained. So here we go.

20 Sept 2014

When the aliens met ISIS (because odds are)

It’s a hot summer evening in the Iraqi desert, the sun had finally disappeared behind the hills in the distance. Two Islamic State recruits are keeping guard on a remote outpost. They had finished their dinner and are sipping their sweet dark tea in silence. Abu Abdullah al-Inglizi is a convert from Birmingham and his companion is Abu Bakr al-Shishani, an engineering student from Chechnya who had quit his studies to fight for the Caliph. Abu Abdullah speaks only English, while Abu Bakr knows few Arabic phrases and even fewer English ones.

12 Sept 2014

We Give the Scottish Independence Referendum the Middle East Expert Treatment

These days, everyone is talking about the Scottish Independence Referendum, especially when they’re not talking about ISIS. But sadly nobody has managed so far to explain this complicated topic in an easy to understand manner. So we commissioned a panel of Western Middle East experts and asked them to apply their unique approach to the subject with their customary disregard for cumbersome nuance and the stifling requirements of accuracy. The result is this fascinating article.

8 Sept 2014

Incredible archive of ancient unseen photographs discovered in Lebanon

While working at a soup kitchen in London a few months ago, I made a startling discovery that revealed a secret archive of photographs from Lebanon dating back for millennia that I am now sharing with the world. A very, very old man approached me and I detected a hint of a Phoenician accent in the way he spoke English and I quizzed him I realised he is also from Lebanon. Over the next few weeks I built a relationship with the man, Abdeshmun of Byblos, and he revealed to me his fascinating story, and in the process revealed the vast archive of six photographs that he possessed which today we are publishing for the first time.

3 Sept 2014

The Top-Ten Single-Digit Numbers of All Time

Even before it was published, this post has been described as 'the ultimate listicle', 'the defining new media article' and 'silly but accurate' by major news organisations and well-known pundits. The buzz surrounding the anticipated publication of the post created waves of excitement on social media and other similar clichés usually used by SM types. So what's the fuss about?

In short, we decided to boil down the listicle to is Platonic ideal. How? By choosing and ranking the top-ten single-digit numbers of all time in collaboration with a panel of experts on the genre. The results are published below, in no particular order.