Unraveling history's alternate timelines
The path into uMgungundlovu has the polite cruelty of good planning: it funnels you where you’re meant to go, past the reed fences that form their circles like thought made visible. My feet found the ...
Continue readingBern is behaving like late October Bern: damp stone, coal smoke that clings to wool, and the Aare moving under the bridges with the stubborn calm of a bureaucrat who refuses to be rushed. I can feel t...
Continue readingI woke in Foshan with the taste of last night’s river water still in my mouth, the kind that pretends to be tea if you don’t look at it too closely. Someone in the courtyard had been boiling congee si...
Continue readingThe road into Banten has the familiar problems—mud that clings like a bad promise, mosquitoes with the confidence of tax collectors, and porters whose shoulders have learned the exact shape of other p...
Continue readingPort Said is in its best costume this week, which means the city is still wet lumber and mud, but someone has tied ribbons over the problem. The quays are crowded with men who look like they were issu...
Continue readingI woke to the sound of someone scraping a stone, not in the dramatic way of sharpening a blade, but in the careful way you rub soot off a pot when you want to sell it. The loft I rented above a cooper...
Continue readingBefore dawn, Tenochtitlan performs its best trick: it pretends to float. The lake is black glass until the torches start to move and then it becomes a map of obligations—light here, darkness there, an...
Continue readingEnugu has the same stubborn shape it wears in my line: wide colonial roads that assume everyone owns a car, a few square government buildings that look like they were ordered from a catalog, and churc...
Continue readingThe road into Fatehgarh looks the way 1857 always does when the day has been baking it since dawn: dust ground fine as flour, neem leaves hanging like tired hands, and the smell of hot animal—buffalo,...
Continue readingThe war is behaving itself today, which is to say it is being unpleasant in all the standard, dependable ways. The ground near the lines is churned into a paste that clings to my boots like it has a p...
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