Modern Times

Columns, Features, Modern Times - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:39 - 11 Comments

Modern Times: A voice from the Wilderness

In this week's 'Modern Times' column, Corin Faife discovers, through a mix of serendipity and curiosity, one of the most talked-about music videos of the past ten years: Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown.

Columns, Features, Modern Times - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 0:20 - 5 Comments

Modern Times: The Blackout

Our internet access is now so ubiquitous, our broadband so fast, cheap, consistent and always on, that losing it seems unthikable. Yet this is precisely what happened to Corin Faife. In this week's Modern Times, he discovers our most modern, most invisible addiction.

Columns, Modern Times, Politics - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 12:43 - 12 Comments

Modern Times: On the REAL cricket scandal

The current media frenzy around the alleged cricket "match-fxing scandal" has been a predictable mix of sanctimonious glee and barely-concealed xenophobia. It seems that, as the far as the UK media is concerned, the crime has been identified and the criminal caught. As our political editor Omayr Ghani shows in a thorough and incisive analysis, the real story is a lot more complicated than that.

Columns, Modern Times - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 12:40 - 2 Comments

Modern Times: Wolf in sheep’s clothing

The Roma community in and around Marseille is the latest group at the receiving end of the steamroller tactics of the French gendarmerie, who on Friday began to expel thousands said to be living illegally in France. But our own government’s approach to immigration is hardly more progressive. Corin Faife examines the British tradition of how to do your dirty work with a smiling face.

Columns, Modern Times - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 11:02 - 14 Comments

Modern Times: Confessions of an ex-racist

Are you a racist? no? what makes you so sure? to put it differently, what would you do if you discovered that your attitudes to other people contained, in fact, elements of racism? How would you deal with such a revelation? Corin Faife thought his attitude to race was unblemished, then he took a test...

Columns, Modern Times - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 13:39 - 10 Comments

Modern Times: Meet the Amish

Idiosyncratic, quixotic, or just plain sinister? the Amish community has been, almost since its inception, the butt of jokes and the subject of fascination tinged with hostility from the mainstream. And yet, considering the giant spiritual malaise afflicting the west of the twenty first century, doesn't the frequent smugness towards the Amish seem rather misplaced? A recent Channel 4 programme makes Corin Faife consider what the Amish philosophy of life can teach us about the modern world, and ourselves.

Columns, Modern Times, Politics, Profiles - Tuesday, August 3, 2010 10:57 - 6 Comments

Modern Times: Osman Rasul – In Memory

On Sunday, Osman Rasul, a 27-year old Iraqi Kurd who had spent nine years in the inhumane limbo of the asylum bureaucracy leaped to his death from the seventh floor of a Nottingham tower block. Ceasefire Columnist Corin Faife, a friend of Osman's, pays tribute to a "warm, kind, respectful man", crushed by the injustice and cruelty of the Home Office's asylum policy.

Modern Times - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 16:55 - 2 Comments

Modern Times: Raoul Moat

“Society creates its own monsters”. So runs, at the time of writing, one of the more intelligent comments posted on the wall of the new Raoul Moat fan page, in stark contrast to the innumerable lines of vitriolic flaming, poor punctuation, ad hominem arguments and flagrant OVERUSE OF CAPS LOCK. Corin Faife takes a look at what the Raoul Moat story, and our collective reaction to it, tell us about the way we live, and think, today.