Unraveling history's alternate timelines
I came up Cornhill with the usual London soundtrack: carts complaining, apprentices shouting as if volume were a trade, and St. Paul’s bells trying to discipline the day into something that resembles ...
Continue readingThe Hooghly was the color of old brass this morning, as if someone had stirred a spoon through the river and forgotten to take it out. Calcutta always wakes in layers: first the wet heat that settles ...
Continue readingCold breath, diesel breath, and damp wool: Berlin in November, doing what Berlin in November always does—making everyone look like they’re waiting for a late train. The streetlights along Bornholmer S...
Continue readingI arrived in Agra by mistake, which is a polite way of saying I trusted a ferryman’s confidence more than my own sense of direction. The river here has the stubborn look of a thing that knows it has b...
Continue readingThe loudspeakers on Huaihai Road start before dawn, as if the city is afraid that quiet will grow ideas. “Long live Chairman Mao,” then a weather report delivered like an accusation: chance of drizzle...
Continue readingI arrived by mistake, which is the honest way to arrive anywhere worth writing about. The drift dropped me onto the Chuya Steppe with my pack half-sanded, my canteen mysteriously lighter, and my one p...
Continue readingThe first thing I always write down—because it’s the first thing my body notices—is the smell. Here it is smoke from cooking fires fed with whatever will burn (rice husk, split bamboo, a strip of rub...
Continue readingPaper first, then water. I stepped off a cobbled lane near the Dam with my boots already damp from a polite Dutch drizzle, and what struck me wasn’t the canals, though they run like stitched seams th...
Continue readingThe petrol queue on Marylebone Road looks like a still life painted with impatience: bumpers at awkward angles, exhausts cooling into silence, and men in rolled-up sleeves leaning on doors they’ve lef...
Continue readingThe first thing I noticed, after realizing I was in the wrong river-town and the right century, was that my shirt had turned two colors. The top half—what the sun could reach—had bleached to a tired ...
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