The 28th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands was marked this week with more journalistic coverage than you would expect. Part of the interest was surely provoked by Steve McQueen’s recent film Hunger, an account of the hunger strike Sands and nine fellow IRA members undertook at the Maze prison in 1981. But there is another factor: hunger striking, which was considered rare and radical when Sands did it, has gone mainstream.

On Wednesday, the Iranian-Japanese-American journalist Roxana Saberi, incarcerated on charges of espionage in Tehran, ended a hunger strike after two weeks, when she was granted an appeal of her conviction. The actress Mia Farrow kept fans posted via blog and YouTube about her own rather complicated fast, scheduled to last 21 days and meant to pressure the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir to re-admit aid agencies expelled from Darfur weeks ago.