Actual Iranian postage stamp, 1983.

– Foreign Policy offers a brief introduction to that subtlest of espionage tactics, the ‘honey trap‘. It’s certainly Sterling Archer’s favorite.

– A fantastic series of photographs called Vider Paris shows the French capital devoid of people, and with the bottom two stories shielded with concrete. But the crosswalks remain.

– Will Wiles offers a great review of the new American embassy in London:

It’s worth taking a step back to really admire what we’re looking at: a building designed with explosions in mind. A shape formed by the manipulation of spheres of destruction. It could be the first London building built with attack from the ground in mind since the Second World War.

– Isegoria offers an overlook of the very first American assault rifle: the Pedersen device.

– An absolutely fascinating article in GlobalPost on Theo Padnos, who pretended to convert to Islam and infiltrated several mosques and madrassas in Yemen. His inside look will surprise you:

As an educated, left-leaning American, Padnos says he expected that intensive, firsthand exposure to the Salafist faith would temper the message emanating from the West, that these ultra-conservative Muslims were to be feared.

Instead, he says that what he witnessed worried him further.

– Terry Eagleton gets Hitchens, Amis, and the rest of the iconoclast ‘movement’ entirely wrong (it’s “Islamophobia”).