World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those he has already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disneyworld, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the 1995 French public sector workers' strike, the Rushdie fatwa, mad cow disease and genetic cloning. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is -- pace his critics -- still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.