#public debate

#public debate

"I'm expected to tell you all why this is the worst city in the world," Sam Kriss, a writer from London, began. He stood at a lectern in the middle of the dark room. The sold-out audience - an uneven mix of techno-optimists and -pessimists, faux centrists and progressives - listened between sips of champagne.

A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, "but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces." The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive.