How digital media are transforming Arab culture, literature, and politics In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models. Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate. Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal. Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.

Captain Herve Jaubert breaks his silence in this explosive true story of Princess Latifa with stunning revelations. Princess Latifa had planned to escape from the Maktoums’ stranglehold for her whole life. She knew the risk of running for freedom. She would have died trying rather than live in submission. When she escaped from Dubai on February 24, 2018, with the help of former French spy Herve Jaubert, Sheikh Mohammed launched a military attack against a US private yacht never seen in maritime history. Latifa is no ordinary princess; she is a tigress; she fought to scream, bite, and kick the Indian commandos who stormed the American yacht where she had taken refuge. They kidnapped her with everyone onboard and took her back to the clenches of her father, the Emir of Dubai. She suffered torture and humiliation because of her determination. Princess Latifa tells us how Sheikh Mohammed sees himself above the law for kidnapping princesses from the streets in the UK or a vessel under US jurisdiction and disappearing others who tried. Her story shows a pattern of abuse over the last twenty years, inhuman treatment, kidnapping, and disappearances on the order of His “Highness” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, in total impunity. Latifa should be returned to US Jurisdiction, where she was taken from. She believes no adult woman in the 21st century should be under Islamic male “possessionship.” It is laughable for Sheikh Mohammed to call himself a champion of women’s rights when he tortures and imprisons his own daughters. Despite the words her father’s minions put in her mouth, Latifa is not free; she is a modern-day hero who deserves to be praised for what she tried to achieve.

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies. Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. It examines the diverse prehistory beyond Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), paying attention to the safety films of the 1960s, the snuff-fictions of the 1970s, and to television reality horror hoaxes and mockumentaries during the 1980s and 1990s in particular. It underscores the importance of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007), and considers YouTube's popular rise in sparking the subgenre's recent renaissance.

This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here ‘below’ has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city—from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.

Cyberbullying is a fact of life for many teens today, with the internet and social media platforms consuming a large part of their social life. This timely guide gives teens the tools they need to identify cyberbullying, understand why and how it happens, and confront it with important social and emotional skills. Readers will learn what they can do to move past a cyberbullying episode and reclaim their online space—and their peace of mind. Accessible information is paired with stimulating sidebars, vibrant photographs, and useful resources to give readers a clear understanding of this important real-life topic.

Before the first day of the war, Gabriel was a simple crop duster with a growing crop-dusting company. That all changed the day a war with creatures not of this world came to his doorstep. The day Gabriel was confronted by the fact that humans were not alone in the universe, he was also confronted by the fact that the United Nations knew of another Earthlike planet called Azora. He discovered that people could settle on this planet and live successfully. Meanwhile, his former wild flame, Jackie, came gliding back into his life. Jackie, one of the first fighter pilots under the command of the United States Space Force and the one that got away, had trained for warfare among the stars. She never thought it would be against an alien race or that she was expected to leave planet Earth behind. With the battles to come and the trials of protecting a new colony on Azora, Jackie and Gabriel also found themselves falling back into passionate love. It was their inevitably combined destiny that they faced a world of new realities together, including escaping with their lives intact and finding peace during a time of such pain and suffering.

Watching Murder shines a light onto the dark world of jihadi murder videos and the people who watch and share them on the internet. Images and videos of murder, torture and other cruelties are everywhere on the internet. Why do some people seek out and watch this material, how are they affected by it and do they have a right to watch any of it in the first place? In this ground-breaking book, terrorism scholar Simon Cottee visits the murky fringes of the internet in search of answers. Focusing on ISIS, he shows how the group transformed the urban myth of the snuff movie into a grim reality watched by tens of thousands of people across the globe. On shock-sites, he finds a contingent of ISIS fans who, while hating the group, love to watch its most monstrous depredations in high definition. He interviews his fellow extremism researchers and asks them about all the dark things they have seen online and how this has affected their mental health. He speaks with the "cleaners" whose job is to report and remove violent jihadi propaganda from the internet. And he surveys thousands of young adults to find out what they think of ISIS and its notorious beheading videos. Cottee exposes the hysteria around online radicalization, and shows how our engagement with violent online spectacles is much more complex and multifaceted than many would have us believe. Watching Murder will appeal to anyone with an interest in violence, media, terrorism and ISIS. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of terrorism studies, political science, culture and communication.

Bizarre weather. Unprecedented economic disparity. Artists employed by corporations. And the ultimate work of art: Oval, a pill that increases generosity. This unforgettable debut novel asks questions of empathy and power on every scale—from bodies to bureaucracies—to create an unsettling portrait of the future. In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain—yet another eco-friendly initiative run by a corporation—they seize the opportunity, but it isn’t long before the experimental house begins malfunctioning. After Louis’s mother dies, Anja is convinced he has changed. At work, Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin’s income inequality. Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold. ”A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel." —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and Annihilation “Elvia Wilk’s Oval is a marvel. At the core of this seductive, acute, superbly-contemporary update of mid-period J.G. Ballard lies a deep-beating, deep-dreaming heart.” —Jonathan Lethem

Imagine you’re isolated in the desert, the least inhabited place on earth, and your guilty past keeps hunting you, following you endlessly like a Shadow. Now, imagine that you wake up from this never-ending nightmare, only to realize it was never a dream and that the idle desert was very much alive! Sort of... The dying wish from his mother forces Mark Rodriguez, a man who struggles with vices and guilt, to reunite with his egocentric brother, John, on a long trip across the desert. When trapped in the ghost town of Esperanza, the Rodriguez brothers will revive their worst traumas, wondering how much their memories influence their reality. The House of Dust is a Supernatural Thriller about grief, challenging what is real and what is an echo from the past, immersing the reader in an endless prison of death.

"Simple life is a myth. Easy catch is a decoy. Beliefs are whims and truths are ploy. ‘Who is Zahana Shah?’ is the very question raking her psyche after spending years hightailing across Europe. In an alter life she was an artist selling her artifacts on the luxe fashion street of Rome. In the same alter life she was riding bikes, flying high, dreaming the dreams of love and living them while having the best time of her life. Today, she walks down the streets of Delhi with an identity so incredible, a bag of secrets so heavy, an inheritance so empowering, a death streak so strong and animosity so revolting. Her plan, to blast a bomb inside a leading multi-billion dollar company of India, jolts the entire nation. Her desire to avenge Jake and his accomplices takes a mysterious turn that leaves her flabbergasted. But she is not alone. Keeping a track of her intentions, desires, rage and menace is Abhay- the very man everyone in the country had seen but none remembered. The only downside of invalidity is that it will be validated someday. How far will she go for love and how farther yet for hate, and finally how farthest to validate her existence and of the unknown man she has known most of her life? "