Unraveling history's alternate timelines
The 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 ...
Continue readingMari 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...
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