Ben Munster

At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. He thought of four, and dialled one up. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. Harnwell hung up, saying th

Linked is the published version — slightly better, updated version here: https://foswellbanks.substack.com/p/kavos-and-the-corona-f75

SIENA - When the Palio di Siena didn’t take place on its usual day for the first time since the Second World War, its reigning champion, Giovanni Atzeni, holed up in his backyard stable outside his Tuscan villa, 35 expensive racehorses for company. “On the day the Palio would have happened, I stayed with my horses,” said Atzeni, 36, the seven-time victor of the notoriously brutal, 500-year-old bareback horse race that was put on ice last year in the wake of Covid. “But my heart pounded as if th

First the priests began to disappear. They used to flock to Benito Canizzaro’s restaurant, Krugh, on the lively Borgo Pio. There they would loosen their clerical collars for the day, and indulge in earthlier pleasures: food, conversation, perhaps a little wine. That was a different time—a whole week ago. Now the Borgo Pio, which adjoins the Vatican, has seen scarcely a single frock. Even before the entire country was placed under total lockdown, their ranks were thinning. “I normally see man

How to make an NFT disappear "Closing the window" on an NFT isn't difficult. NFTs are rendered visually only on the front-end of a given marketplace, where you see all the images on offer. All the front-end code does is sift through the alphanumeric soup on the blockchain to produce a URL that links to where the image is hosted, or less commonly metadata which describes the image. According to Clement: “the code that finds the information on the blockchain and displays the images and informatio

A hush fell as the police cars moved in slowly, circling the crowds gathered in the shadow of one of Rome’s old, great churches, the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, a rust-colored, colonnaded cube behind which a bell tower sharply rises. A group of us were enjoying a night in the newly reopened city and the convoy unnerved us. Rome’s police had always set us on edge: In the Before Times they would idle their vehicles in loose configurations around that same square, fining tourists and lo

NEW YORK—Mike Dudas keeps offering me a job at his website, The Block, at a rate far higher than what I could possibly dream of at Decrypt. But I keep declining, because I’d sooner go and join ISIS than toil in his trigger-happy tweet abattoir. But I could use the money, to be honest, so I’m keeping him dangling at arm’s length just in case the Decrypt piggy bank runs dry. But having a hungry Dudas on one’s back is hard work. He’s relentless—like a pedophile priest—and, like an attractive, ging

An hour’s drive west of Venice, at the far end of a valley of rolling green hills, lies the small town of Vò. There are only around 3,000 residents, and everybody knows everybody. The kids go to the same school. People wave at one another in the street. The nonnas are on warm terms with the local grocer, who is friends with the pharmacist, who happens to be the mayor’s son. On an unseasonably warm day in late February, Vò became the subject of a huge experiment. Wearing masks and gloves, standi

A traveller from Rome looking to dine at Anikò, a gourmet Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant in the small commune of Senigallia, would have to first take a four hour train up to Ancona, a city on the Adriatic coastline. Then, surviving contradictory directions from locals and a regional ticketing app from which it is impossible to actually buy tickets, the traveller would have to endure a forty-five minute bus ride along a journey route that doesn’t appear on Google Maps, and, finally, a six-min

If you walk right down by the Tiber in Rome’s postwar district of Portuense, a few miles south of the city’s centre, and look closely, you’ll see a strange debris caught in the river’s churn: plastic bottles, brown paper bags, polystyrene cartons, a flotilla of refuse deposited from the banks. Perhaps it has drifted in from neighbouring Ostiense, across the river, where the grand, stark-white Stazione di Roma Ostiense, still bearing fascist insignia, presides over a square into which half the ci

Over the course of a single day walking the streets of Rome, Giulia*, one of the city’s many rough sleepers, was stopped three times by Italian police. They presented her with a uniquely cruel catch-22: cough up documentary proof that you’re allowed to leave the home you do not have, or face a hefty fine and possible jail-time. Giulia was at a loss. “She told them, ‘I’m sleeping in the Rifiugo Sant’Anna,’ a shelter in Rome,” recalled Alessandro Radicchi, the founder of homeless charity Binario

Until a few months ago the healthcare system in Lombardy, Italy’s wealthiest region, was widely admired. The system was described as the second most efficient in the world, with an annual turnover of €7.8 billion. Thousands of people from Italy and beyond flocked to its hospitals each year to avail themselves of its doctors and pioneering medical research. “Be healthy,” read an online brochure for the region, “come to Lombardy.” When an outbreak of a new coronavirus in China was reported in Jan

Faisan runs a convenience store in the heart of Trastevere, a vibrant medieval district that runs along the banks of the Tiber in Rome. His shelves stock alcohol, snacks, canned fish, at least a dozen permutations of spaghetti. It’s all very convenient. Except for one thing: he only takes cash. Italy is predominantly a cash economy. Research shows that around 86% of payments made throughout the country are settled in cash, versus 28% in the UK. ATMs, or bancomats, abound, many nestling in the doorways of stores like Faisan’s. Only the more upmarket vendors — supermarkets, designer clothes shops, tourist traps — offer a cashless reprieve.

Andrew Brandt breeds viruses on a rack of computers that live in his home. “It’s my lil’ malware zoo,” says the cybersecurity researcher. His goal, he explains, is to see how a given virus or malware acts when it is “left to its own devices.” All his mechanical victims have to do is “just sit there and be infected.” Most of the time, the computers live to see another day. But not always. In 2017, Jack, an aging Dell D620 laptop, and one of Brandt’s most long-suffering victims, was receiving i