In part 3 of this subcriber-only review series I look at season three of The Wire. In this season the Barksdale storyline comes to a climax, while the city hall politics are added into the ever-expanding world of the show. I examine the Hamsterdam experiment, where one police major decides ...
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In the second of my subscriber-only reviews of The Wire I look at season 2. Focusing on smuggling through the port of Baltimore this season explores how capitalism has evolved to a post-industrial phase dominated by service industries like sex and drugs, how investigating sex slavery is relegated behind lesser ...
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This is part 1 of a new subscriber-only review series where I talk about The Wire. In this episode I discuss some of the recurring themes - the war on drugs, the failed police tactics, the dirty money trail - along with the complex metaphysics of the show. I talk ...
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Sam Greenlee is perhaps most famous for writing the novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which was adapted into a film in the 1970s.  Greenlee believed that the CIA and FBI suppressed the film because it portrayed them in such a bad light, and promoted black militancy.  A ...
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Mark Felt is a 2017 biopic starring Liam Neeson as FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, telling the story of his role in becoming a source for the Washington Post's reporting on Watergate. Following on from recent episodes on John Paisley and the Weather Underground, I offer a deconstructive view of ...
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Image 5 in the Met Police’s CCTV collection of Petrov and Boshirov also poses some questions. Their timeline says: Image five shows the suspects ten minutes later — at 11.58 — on Wilton Road, Salisbury, we say, moments before the attack. The police did not say where on Wilton Road that this image was ...
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In the latest chapter in the Salisbury Novichok saga the police have released a selection of images of two men they are naming as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. While there has been widespread speculation that the images are fake, doctored or otherwise not real pictures, this has involved a ...
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Rear Window is one of my all-time favourite films so in this episode I discuss its unique production, the ethics of spying and voyeurism explored in the story, and feminist critiques of both Hitchcock and his movies.  Transcript Rear Window is one of my favourite films of all time, ...
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Alfred Hitchcock virtually invented the spy movie genre, and made a career making films about murder, intrigue, cover-ups, suspense and spies.  He suspected that he was under FBI surveillance during the production of Notorious, but the release file only covers a later period.  Rather than being concerned with Hitchcock himself, ...
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In this special podcast just for Pearse's patreon subscribers (also available to my subscribers) we discuss all things Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix and Christopher Wylie.  Fundamentally we ask whether their activities are new or unique, or merely the most well-known when dozens of other companies and government agencies do the ...
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Cambridge Analytica are a big data marketing firm who, according to numerous media commentators, were the critical factor in the election of Donald Trump. They are the subject of many officially-endorsed, fully-mainstreamed conspiracy theories proposed by different segments of the political-media spectrum. This week we take a critical look at ...
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Leaked documents from JTRIG (the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) show that GCHQ's operations are not only bigger, more invasive and more manipulative than previously realised, but also that they name their tools and techniques after films, TV shows and even genres of music ...
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