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Indian voters have just handed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party a landslide victory and Modi a second five-year term. How that happened is no mystery, and might be a cautionary example for other democracies around the world. Modi launched his
In 2007, around the time I started getting interested in food and wine and began writing the occasional restaurant review, I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. A decade and change later, I don’t remember much about the book, aside from
A little over a week ago, as I was preparing for bed, I heard through the grapevine that there had been an explosion in Turin, Italy, where fans of Juventus FC had been watching their team play Real Madrid on
Americans are often pleasantly surprised, upon arriving in Vietnam for the first time, by how little the Vietnamese seem to care about the war these days. They might feel a pang of guilt or two, or else an off-putting sense
When I departed Australia for Spain last year, I had my Kindle packed and ready. My reading had been planned in advance: Booker winners and Russian classics and theses on the nature of democracy—a library’s worth of books at my
A couple of years back, in the lead-up to a visit to Russia, my girlfriend bought a Lonely Planet guide that I took an immediate disliking to. Reading Alex Garland’s The Beach in my youth had predisposed me to disliking
The men at the Can Diyarbakir ticket desk in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, eyed the lapel of my filthy white shirt with a mix of admiration and concern. “We appreciate it very much,” said one, indicating the Kurdish
A few weeks back, in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US-led campaign against Islamic State was compared to the Spanish Civil War. This seemed appropriate enough. When I was in Iraq two months ago, I thought a