Unraveling history's alternate timelines
Wet October has a special talent for making everything look like it has already been handled by the state: stone darkened to the color of old tea, paint dulled by drizzle, and people moving with the p...
Continue readingThe canal smells like it always does in Northern Song cities: wet hemp rope, river mud, and the sour-sweet breath of fermented bean curd that has soaked into breakfast boards no matter how often they ...
Continue readingThe first thing I noticed was that Vienna in February has a particular kind of damp cold that sneaks in through wool. It isn’t dramatic. It’s not even rude. It just sits on your shoulders and patientl...
Continue readingSan Francisco should have had the honor today, and in most sensible arrangements of history it does: flags snapping in Pacific fog, hotel carpets suffering under diplomatic shoes, and the United Natio...
Continue readingBarcelona remains stubbornly itself under the shelling: tram wires over the Rambla, the Hotel Colón wrapped in slogans, walls pasted so thick with militia notices that the corners lift like old pastry...
Continue readingThe air war began tonight, and even here that phrase carries the proper weight. Kuwait is still occupied. Iraqi soldiers still stand at intersections with cigarettes pinched in their lips and rifles r...
Continue readingKyoto in December still does that trick where it looks like a postcard someone left in the freezer. The morning air bites cleanly at the inside of my nose. My breath comes out in polite little clouds,...
Continue readingMorning in the northern garrison belt always begins with the same argument between temperature and wind. The air inside my borrowed room was stale and almost warm, like breath caught in cloth. The mom...
Continue readingI 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 reading