Sri Mathie

25/02/2026

If you are American of a respectable vintage, I am guessing you had a set of painted metal canisters in your kitchen.

25/02/2026

Life’s always better with cheese

15/02/2026

28/01/2026

When Elizabeth Tsurkov conducted fieldwork for her Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2023, an academic trip to Iraq unexpectedly turned into an immersive field study on the ways authoritarian regimes use brutality, she writes. https://theatln.tc/XLT0HfkM

The Iraqi militiamen who tortured her had a comical lack of knowledge about their perceived enemies, crossed with an “almost-medical” level of knowledge of torture. “This mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers,” Tsurkov writes. “Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population.”

But relying on physical abuse makes for proficient torturers, not skilled interrogators. “Again and again, torture has proved to produce false confessions and bad intelligence,” she writes.

“The only knowledge that torture provides is the ultimate confirmation bias: information about the threats facing the regime that is entirely in line with the worldview of the torturers, who characteristically share the regime’s generalized paranoia,” Tsurkov continues.

When Tsurkov was transferred to a second prison, where she was confident that she wouldn’t be tortured again, she told an Iranian officer the truth: that all of her confessions had been lies produced under torture.

“I knew I could make up anything,” she told him, “since the Mossad has penetrated you, but you have not penetrated the Mossad.” After believing for two years that she was indeed a spy, he appeared to accept the truth.

🎨: Patrick Leger

27/01/2026

Cecil the guardian of our flock.