What to make of this 19th C. Arab-Chinese-Peruvian portrait?
Long distance cultural exchange began much earlier than we sometimes imagine
Ten years gone
On the street, watching the World Trade Center fall and our nation misinterpret why it happened
Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh can see!
It’s a miracle! How else to explain his remarkable recovery in a Saudi hospital?
When not at war, Beirut feels like Santa Monica
But the city braces as the UN accuses Hezbollah of assassinating Rafik Hariri in 2005
A landmark moment in Turkey
The decades-long shadow play between the military and the state took a most dramatic turn last week
Patti Smith sends me to the Chelsea Hotel
The Chelsea, she writes, was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone. Indeed.
What am I doing on a bench in Italy on Google Street View
I am writing in my journal about the Google car passing in front of me
More evidence the China building boom is ending
But here are the astounding numbers on what they’ve built
Macau’s architectural legacy
A schizophrenic policy of sacrificing new land to preserve old buildings
Visiting the land of ethnic cleansing
The triumph of Sarajevo: cosmopolitanism survives the nativists’ war
How my journey to Beirut ended up on an art gallery wall
I had become a migratory subject for the artist Walead Beshty
An art opening at Experimenta in Hong Kong
Unusually for Hong Kong, something unexpected might happen
Watching Dante in 3-D in a cathedral, and other New York transgressions
For a night, the New Museum turns all of Nolita into a video art space
Visiting the oyster heaven just north of San Francisco
Oysters may be an acquired taste but Tomales Bay is definitely the best place to acquire it
Another dinosaur nears the end, this time in Yemen
Yemen is a hard place to govern but Ali Abdullah Saleh has done a poor job of it all the same
The great China infrastructure build-out is almost over
China’s building boom has been going on for 20 years; a recent visit to Fujian shows that’s ending.
Seeing Cambodia and Indonesia on the roads of Tamil Nadu in India
There was once a Hindu empire in southeast Asia and reminders of it are everywhere in Tamil Nadu
The surreal experience of visiting Libya
With a Libyan human rights activist, racing through the Tripoli medina alleys to avoid eavesdroppers
Why downtown Cairo has been the symbolic center of protest since the 1950s
Downtown Cairo burned on 26 January 1952; exactly 59 years later, it is the center of protest again
