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There are a number of conflicts today involving groups and individuals as regards nature in its various forms. The aim of this article is to examine how these give rise to changes in the forms of critique and justification that underpin them. Based on various points of disagreement as to how nature should be developed, three possibilities of change have been put forward for examination according to the importance of the transformations required: (a) integration of the model into existing orders of justification, (b) development of a new order based on the same model, (c) serious adjustment of the underlying common matrix of orders and the basis it offers for appreciating injustice.

Purpose – Focusing on popular culture as unstructured, emergent talk, rather than encapsulated genre or text, this chapter dramatizes a slice of life riven by constant fear of violent assault.

Approach – I access accusatory discourse as the victim of the robbery that precipitates it. The chapter creates an impromptu alternative arena for reflexive ethnographic analysis of crime.

Findings – Most Brazilians live in South Atlantic coastal cities where beaches are loci of social and symbolic action carried out in a carnivalesque mode. The beach symbolizes the myth of national identity, or brasilidade. Culturally specific, yet transnational, beaches are sexually pleasurable spaces of race and class mixing. Armed robbery is the painful shadow-twin of celebration, as much a part of popular culture as bikinis, drink, and dance, but so, too, are the informal community mechanisms attempting to exclude less desirable carnival propensities from spaces marked safe and respectable. A whirlpool of rumor draws on an array of deviant images and acts.

Originality/value – Crime and social control are part of popular culture not merely as engines of re-presentation but as elemental aspects of practical living.

Purpose – To explain the unswerving loyalty given to Charles Manson by his followers from a religious perspective by drawing on Durkheim’s (1912/1976) theory of religion and Hall’s (2003, 2013) theory of religion and violence.

Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative analysis of archived multimedia either quoting, or written by, members of the Manson Family. Specifically, a theoretical thematic analysis is used to draw inferences on how members explained their participation in the 1969 murders.

Findings – The Manson Family display a unified belief system premised on the sacredness ascribed to Helter Skelter, forming a moral community at Spahn Ranch. Manson was conceived as the clan’s God, thereby meeting most of Durkheim’s requirements for a religious formation. A main component of their belief system was the inevitability of Helter Skelter, or the upcoming racial revolution; the ultimate war and end of the world. This belief provides one explanation for the Manson murders; that they were carried out as a religious duty to initiate Helter Skelter.

Originality/value – Despite the continued public fascination with the Manson murders, only a few studies have applied a sociotheoretical framework to explain this event and none have used a religious account from the perspective of those involved. By introducing religion as one plausible framework, this research is not only an extension of Durkheim’s work but also contributes to existing literature on the relationship between religion and violence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.