Новости за 16.08.2016

A Syrian soldier of Islamic State tells all. This piece is the first of a three-part series describing in detail the group’s history, leadership and methods. “Over a period of 10 months, we spent more than 100 hours with [Abu Ahmad]. He patiently answered our questions on everything from how he ended up with the Islamic State, how it is organized, the identity of the European foreign fighters within the group. Our interviews would go on for six hours a day, in week-long stretches”

Is it wrong to profit from death? American regulators pursue a hedge fund which paid hospice patients to open joint investment accounts that rewarded the survivor when one party died. “These patients had something valuable. They were going to die soon. Lathen found a way to make a profit off of it — $9.5 million. Lathen gave $10,000 each to the people who supplied his most important raw material: death. I don’t know if that’s the going rate, but he found willing sellers”

Encounters with the fortune-tellers and magicians of Los Angeles, including an evening at The Castle, clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts: “The audience went silent when Gaughan introduced a live re-enactment of Robert-Houdin’s moon-and-Pierrot piece, in which an English magician named Mystina floated beside a talking, three-dimensional crescent. The woman danced and somersaulted above the floor, and passed through a ring Gaughan held before he slipped into the wings”

Profile of architect Madeline Gins, whose deliberately awkward buildings were designed to “destabilise” inhabitants physically and mentally. In a Gins building you had to stay alert to avoid falling over, which Gins thought was the key to a longer life. “Procedural architecture, as they called their technique, was a way of creating buildings that had far more in common with poetry, in which the writer experiments with language to achieve certain effects, than with most traditional architectural practice”