Unraveling history's alternate timelines
Mari sits on the Euphrates the way a cat sits on a warm brick: confident, proprietary, and not at all concerned with what it is crushing underneath. The river smells of fish scales and wet rope. The s...
Continue readingPetrograd in late October still smells like wet wool, coal smoke, and the kind of cabbage that has surrendered. Outside the Nikolaevsky Station the paving stones shine as if they have been varnished b...
Continue readingI woke up in Düsseldorf with the taste of yesterday’s strong coffee still stuck to the back of my tongue and the wrong city on my ticket. The paper said Frankfurt am Main, which was either a clerical ...
Continue readingI came into Ai-Khanoum at the wrong hour for romance and the right hour for truth: late morning, when the sun is high enough to make every crack in the mudbrick show its age, and when everyone has alr...
Continue readingThe air here smells like cattle before it smells like anything else: warm hide, trampled grass, and dung drying into pale coins that crunch underfoot when you step wrong. I walked into kwaBulawayo wit...
Continue readingThe morning began the way it usually does in this part of the world: the call to prayer arriving before daylight has decided whether it feels like showing up, goats negotiating ownership of alleyways,...
Continue readingArrived by canal at first light, the way this country prefers to introduce itself: a low horizon, a sky doing most of the work, and a city that looks like it was designed by accountants with strong op...
Continue readingThe first thing I heard after the armored personnel carrier clattered past the bakery was a Nokia ringtone—one of those tinny, proud little monophonic chirps—and then, immediately after, an actual bir...
Continue readingThe tram from Töölö ran with the steady patience of a metronome. Every stop came with the same two sounds: the wet hiss of doors and the soft clack of someone’s shoes stepping down into a shallow pudd...
Continue readingI came in with the caravans because that’s what the Sahel is for: moving things that are too heavy, too valuable, or too far from the places that want them. From the top of the Bandiagara escarpment t...
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