INDONESIA (part 2) & HONG KONG

 Countries visited: Indonesia (Bali, Sumatra, Papua), Hong Kong, Macau

LOCAL STORIES

• I was pretty bad at consuming HK lit/media while there, mostly because I was too busy meeting up with friends/family an stuffing my face with ALL THE EGG TARTS. I’ll catch up in San Francisco (which is kind of HK lite, anyway...).

• Sitting somewhere between Chinese folklore and futuristic science fiction is the sometimes uneven, but often excellent, short story anthology: The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. The titular story absolutely slays me.

OPIOID WARS

Theres been plenty of excellent journalism around the opioid crisis in the states. Some particularly good ones:

• “Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’” (NYT) - A fascinating look at how difficult it is to make good policy for the twin problems drug abuse and homelessness.

• “The Lazarus Drug” (Hidden Brain) - Does Narcane actually result in MORE deaths? The moral hazard argument.

• “Treating America’s Opioid Addiction” series (Distillations: Science + Culture + History) - A bit slow (so I’m still working my way through it), but an interesting take on the history of addiction and treatment.

RANDOM STORIES

• “The FBI of The National Park Service” (Outside) - I love reading about strange jobs, and this one is pretty wild (bad pun intended).

• “The Snapchat Thief” (Reply All podcast) - A slightly hokey episode, but one that pretty effectively drives home just how bad most of us are at protecting our privacy/data and how easy it is to have our digital identities stolen.

• “How Russia Helped Swing the Election” (New Yorker) - A nonpartisan academic and fact-checking expert’s assessment of how likely Trump’s win is attributable to Russian interference (spoiler alert: it probably is). It also asks an interesting question of why we are requiring a higher burden of proof on this question than we would for ordinary criminal legal matters (she argues we’re asking for 100% certainty rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”).

• “The Myth of Meritocracy” (Guardian) - A philosophical take on why meritocracy and policies of “equality of opportunity” are unethical. I find such arguments quite compelling - my favorite philosophy reads at Oxford were around this topic.

• “A Man’s Last Letter Before Being Killed on a Forbidden Island” (NYT) - Crazy that, even in 2018, places as remote as the North Sentinel Islands still exist.

• StartUp’s “Success Academy” mini-series - An engaging look at a controversial charter school network. (Personally I have no firm opinion on charter schools, so I find it interesting to hear both sides of the argument.)

DYSTOPIA

In case the current world is not dystopian enough for you...

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - Werner finally read this beautifully visual dystopian novel about a traveling group of musicians/actors trying to produce beauty and art in a desolate land. I read it a couple years ago and loved it.

• Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood - I’ve never watched the show but quite enjoyed the book, which is paced just fast enough to be a page-turner and knows when to end. (I couldn’t really imagine wanting to immerse myself in multiple TV seasons of this world...)

• Not recent reads, but if you’re into dystopias / this type of sci-fi, you should also read The Power by Naomi Alderman (what happens if women became physically stronger than men) and The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (a dark, moody book about a man, his dog, and his trigger-happy neighbor trying to defend their land/lives in a post-apocalyptic world).

INDONESIA (part 1)

Indonesian islands visited: Flores, Bali, Sulawesi

 LOCAL MEDIA

• Indonesia, etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani (nonfiction book): I broke my rule about reading only local books written by locals (not foreign outsiders) because I had heard so many good things about this one. It was written by an Irish woman fluent in Bahasa Indonesian, who worked as a journalist in Jakarta for many years, and then as a public health consultant for the federal government. The book fit somewhere between travel writing (which I don’t normally like) and long-form narrative journalism (which I do like). It gave history and context, describing life and politics in islands across Indonesia, but with a focus on the eastern islands (where we have mostly been traveling). It made for remarkably enjoyable and insightful reading, which helped provide a framework for understanding what we have been seeing. And despite the very varied cultures, we have been able to see some similarities (good, bad, and banal) across islands— the display of buffalo horns outside traditional houses, as a display of clan wealth; the local politics of small gangs (“preman”) running bits of local business (e.g., not allowing Uber-like companies to run in specific neighborhoods to keep up a taxi mafia) and likely supported by police/politicians; the proliferation of small districts forming so that more people can be public servants (and enjoy the legal and illegal dues granted by such status); the striking breadth of the Indonesian language (even in remote villages, the elders can speak some bahasa); and of course the ever-present childs’ chants of “hello mister” or”hello madam” wherever we go. Highly recommended for anyone going to Indonesia, or wanting to understand it.

• Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan (fiction book) - This was a fascinating example of contemporary Indonesian lit. It is a bizarre, multi-generational folk tale with magic-realist elements in which everyone (man, animal, dog, or ghoul) acts strangely; sex and rape are banal; women’s only source of power (and pain) is their beauty; and the power dynamics shift over time (from the Dutch, to the Japanese, to the army, and then to myriad preman gangsters) but never to the benefit of the population. It was honestly one of the strangest books I have ever read, and I don’t know if I liked it or not. (International critics, however, did: it was on several eminent “best books” lists.)

• The Act Of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (documentary) - This film, which made the film festival circuit, was hugely influential in Indonesia, for bringing attention to the government-sanctioned mass killings of “communists” (including many political opponents and innocent Chinese Indonesians) under President Suharto, and to the still-prevalent power of the paramilitary and gangster forces who actually executed the killings. Prior to this, the average Indonesian had not seriously and publicly considered the role of paramilitaries, or the “rooting out” of communists, as historically problematic. It is equal parts fascinating and disturbing.

• One of the most interesting parts of traveling has been to see how local traditions/belief systems have melded with new Muslim, Hindu (Bali), Christian (Tana Toraja, Sulawesi), or Catholic (western Flores) ones. One interesting piece showcasing this is BBC Documentary’s podcast episode on “Sex Mountain” (Gunung Kemukus) in Java, where Muslims believe that having extramarital sex on this mountain will bring them financial/business success.

• “When Death Doesn’t Mean Goodbye” (NatGeo) [h/t Wuryati]: A great look at a society in Sulawesi that views death completely differently than we do. Death is the point of life. So corpses are mummified and kept at home until the family can afford a good (days-long, animal-sacrifice-filled) funeral, after which they are left in caves, and retrieved every few years for worship and re-dressing. (We are currently in this region learning more about the culture, visiting the catacomb caves, attending a community funeral, etc.)

LONG FORM

• “What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles?” By Darius Miles (Players Tribune): A great, rollicking read, from the horse’s mouth, on what it’s like to be drafted out of high school from the inner city to the NBA, and then to lose it all.

• “YouTubers Will Enter Politics, and the Ones Who Do are Probably Going to Win” (Buzzfeed): From Brazil, a foreshadowing of what politics everywhere will look like in the future: power will go to those who know how to control social media narratives. (The MLB group of 20-somethings have gotten multiple members elected to public office. They also have managed to be on the front page of YouTube every day for the 30 days preceding this article’s publication.) [Also, sidenote: MAN has Buzzfeed News gotten legitimately good.]
  

• The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis: This book was incredibly frustrating. The point was to portray how incompetent the Trump administration is at performing basic government responsibilities (a bit too easy, and thus boring, premise). Instead, the book COULD have simply argued: most Americans don’t know what our federal agencies do, and that’s a pity because, look here, these agencies do really cool and important things. And that, ultimately, is why I would still recommend this short book: because it provides great insight into the function of institutions like the weather bureau (which, strangely, sits inside the Dept of Commerce). Lewis, after all, is a master at turning the arcane, fascinating. The best chapter is the final one on NOAA and tornadoes.

PODCASTERY

• Reply All: “The Crime Machine parts 1 and 2” - I love it when PJ reports on real hard-hitting issues (eg healthcare.gov). In this 2-parter, he looks at how a data-driven algorithm went from helping the NYPD solve crimes even for poor, marginalized victims — to victimizing the very communities the system was meant to protect.
  

• TED radio hour: Quite enjoyed “Hacking the Law” (especially the two speakers on bail bond funds, and on randomized civic representation) and “The Right to Speak” (I have mixed feelings on the subject).
  

• Although I haven’t loved the last 2 episodes of Heavyweight, I still think this is my favorite podcast right now— because when it’s good, it’s absolute gold. For the uninitiated, good episodes to start with: #2 Gregor, #9 Milt, and #14 Isabel.
  

• Werner is really feeling the new season of Serial, in which each episode focuses on a different ordinary case, highlighting how the American justice system works (or does not work).
  

VIETNAM

Countries visited: Vietnam (everywhere!), Thailand (Koh Tao)

 It’s been a while since I last posted - so this is gonna be a long one...

LOCAL STORIES

• I read The Sympathizer (tragicomedic satire, 2016 Pulitzer winner, I liked but didn’t love it) just a few months before this RTW trip - so I gave myself a pass.
• Werner watched the 10-part, 18-hour Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War (AKA “the American War” to the Vietnamese). He loved it. Also was interesting for instance that he had never heard of things like the My Lai massacre or the Tet Offensive - which I suppose as Americans we learn about.
• Had some good chats with expat friends in Saigon about the war / politics in Vietnam. Many were Vietnamese Americans, whose parents fled after the war and still harbored some resentment of the north. Common things heard: Of course the US lost bc the Americans were so obvious about their tactics and positions (whereas the North Vietnamese “would hide under lily pads... you never knew which lilies had a soldier underneath!”), South Vietnam would have continued being prosperous (more so than unified Vietnam today) and had the countries stayed separate would have been like North/South Korea; the Northerners subjected many to “re-education” camps and took away everything. (In Vietnamese museums, the rhetoric/story was quite pro-revolution, stating things like the North Vietnamese never tortured anyone despite, for instance, John McCain testifying that he was tortured as a POW.)
• Also, nice perspective for America-centric folks, from the always-sensible Hans Rosling: “I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War [...] Niem drove me to one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. [...] Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed. Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?” This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China. The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The ‘Resistance War Against America’ took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion.”

REGIONAL STORIES

• Guilty pleasure admission time: I devoured all 3 books in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, joyously. They were pretty trashy (and make me wonder how clueless foreigners now perceive Singapore/China??) but also were full of fun insights into (and jabs at) cultures adjacent to my own. For instance, I recognized all too well the Hong Kongers sneering at “Mainlanders” (Mainland Chinese).
• “What Happened to Fan Bing-Bing, China’s Most Famous Actress?” (NYTimes): What happens when an actress gets too opulent to remain a good public symbol for Communist China? A nice, real-world political balance to Crazy Rich Asians! 
• “The Great Chinese Art Heist” (GQ): This is a crazy, crazy story of how a string of European art museums are now being robbed of specific items originally looted by Anglo-French forces from China’s Summer Palace in 1860. But who’s stealing them?

FAKE NEWS, VIOLENCE, and FACEBOOK ABROAD

I’ve been mildly addicted to reading about the effects of “fake news” abroad, in markets that most Facebook employees probably know nothing about and that most Facebook shareholders probably care not at all about. There’s been great coverage of this, especially some recent ones from Buzzfeed. Highlights:

• Philippines (Buzzfeed), where social media experts used FB to bring and keep Duterte to power, and justify the extrajudicial killings of “druggies” (read: the poor / political opponents).
• Myanmar (Buzzfeed) where FB helped foment hatred against the Rohingya Muslims and justify a genocide
• Dehumanizing, desensitizing speech allows for the violence that often follows it. (No genocide or targeted mass violence has occurred without such media.) And FB is the biggest loudspeaker we’ve ever had.
• Choice quote from the Myanmar article: “Questions remain as to how Facebook can scale its approach to regulating content in a country where hate speech is overwhelmingly common on social media, and enforce its rules without alienating its users or becoming the country’s de facto censor.” More context: In both of the above places, the “Facebook Free” program means that people can access the internet for free using FB (ie, all data costs are reverse-billed, for you payments/product nerds) - so that most people’s understanding of the internet is filtered through their FB feed. In Myanmar, the words “Facebook” and “internet” are used interchangeably. This, coupled with the very few local language experts (in the Philippines, 40 people) doing all the fact-checking, presents a tricky situation: Should 40 Tagalog speakers be the gatekeepers of truth/news for an entire country of 103million people?!
• Another interesting question: in policing fake news, should FB be policing “inauthentic accounts and pages” (but what if these pages post real news?) or policing “false information” (what if they’re spoken by a real authority, e.g. a president?) - h/t this article
• Also interesting reads: Facebook / Fake news in Nicaragua (New Yorker) and Sri Lanka (NYTimes)
• Related, “Not Quite Democracy” (Longreads) An interview with the author of Silicon States on how Big Tech (wrongly) sees itself as “democratizing” goods/services and heightening “transparency” (AKA why we need more public policy people in tech, nudge nudge 😉)

AMERICANA

• “Having the Wrong Conversations about Hate Activity” (Longreads): A beautiful, heart-wrenching account of race and motherhood, and casual racism in America. (Parts of this remind me of the excellent Dear White People Netflix series)
• “Bundyville” podcast mini-series: An evocative and fascinating look at the fight over ranching in national lands in the American West. The host has a clear, unapologetic point of view, but I prefer that over false neutrality. This is fine journalism.
• “Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America” (Atlantic): Long but well-researched and -written article about how Manafort rewrote the rules of lobbying in Washington, and how he allowed us to catch him.

INTERNATIONAL STORIES / SCIENCE CORNER

• “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World” (book) by Hans Rosling - Only the late Rosling could make demographics so fun and engaging. This book makes you immediately a more informed and better global citizen. Please read it.
• “Windfall: The Booming Business of Climate Change” (book) by McKenzie Funk: Werner finally read this book that I’ve been raving about FOR YEARS, and he also loved it. This is my hands-down favorite book on climate change, and I used to work full-time on climate change research. Why? People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them scientific facts about climate projections, but when you say that people are creating whole companies or hedge funds based on these projections, when big money bets are on the line, then suddenly people get it. Shit is going to happen, and there will be winners, and there will be losers. Also, it’s a well-written, entertaining, cheeky book - in the vein of Michael Lewis or Mary Roach.
• “Story of a Face: How a Transplanted Face Saved Katie Stubblefield’s Life” (NatGeo): I’m actually not sure how to describe this photo essay / article. It’s tragic, interesting, and philosophical. Also, those PHOTOS 😱.

Oh-so-lovely LAOS

 LOCAL STORIES:

Unexpectedly, we ended up seeing 3 movies about Laos—

• The Rocket: This little beaut of a film won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival a few years ago, and for good reason. The basic story is simple—a Laotian boy tries to prove he isn’t bad luck by winning a rocket-building contest—but it elegantly weaves in Laotian folklore, tribal animist rites, and panoramic shots of the countryside/jungle. Highly recommended.
• Chang: A drama of the wilderness: A hotel in Luang Prabang was showing this silent film each evening, and we were unexpectedly delighted by it. It’s pioneer man-vs-nature feel definitely feels dated (watching them celebrate shooting now-endangered species is pretty awful), but it is incredible footage that must have been insanely difficult to gather and manually splice together. Apparently the filmmakers spent about 2 years in the Laotian jungle filming it. Oh, and fun fact: it was nominated at the very first Academy Awards!
• Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice: A Dutch documentary of how tourism to a Laotian village has changed things. I found it beautifully filmed but also pretty slow/boring and not all that insightful. That said, Werner loved it.

I also read one book on Laos:

• The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalai Yang: A Laotian-American author writes this loving tribute to her father, a Hmong tribesman who had to flee Laos because the Hmong were being punished for siding with the Americans in the “Secret War.” He then spent 8 years in a Thai refugee camp, before getting refugee status in the US, where he had to brave Minnesotan winters, backbreaking factory work, and the racist ignorance of midwestern America. The book was interesting (and, as a child of immigrants, more than a little guilt-inducing) but not I wouldn’t go out of my way to read it.

GLOBAL STORIES

•  How China got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port” (NYTimes): This is an incredible and important story about China’s new “Belt and Road” initiative, its forays into “international development,” and the underlying drivers of its newfound “global goodwill.” Key quote: “[It] amounts to a debt trap for vulnerable countries around the world, fueling corruption and autocratic behavior in struggling democracies.” The bright side? Maybe China’s strategies to prop up corrupt officials will also be its downfall - e.g., potentially failed deal in Pakistan, disrupted plans in Malaysia, etc.
• “El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis” (Esquire, from 2016): A duallt entertaining, sobering, and educational account linking: the American opioid crisis, our legalization/decriminalization of marijuana, the capture(s) of Mexican drug lord El Chapo,  drug economics 101, and the Mexican political economy. Oh yes, it’s quite the ride. (Craziest stat: 12% of the Mexican economy is funded by drug cartel money.) Related read: “How Heroin Came for Middle Class Moms,” from Marie Claire. (Over 70% of heroin addicts in America were originally addicted to pharmaceutical pills. I wonder if the next generation of kids will grow up with a totally different conception of the archetypal heroin user.)

• Inside the Poisoning of a Russian Double-Agent (GQ): The ramifications of this invisible poison are terrifying. Imagine being in that town and not knowing where traces might still be.  
• The Stoner Arms Dealers (Rolling Stone / Longform): Introduce War on Terror. Add well-intentioned (if impractical) rules around procurement. Mix with political rhetoric around “equipping Afghanis to fight.” Sprinkle cheap Soviet arms. Bake with high school dropouts with too much swagger. Here’s a messy result, one as American as apple pie. This story is absolutely incredible, and I’d bet money that it’ll become a Hollywood movie. 

  ...AND THE RANDOM ENTERTAINING STUFF

• “How an ex-cop rigged McDonald’s Monopoly game and stole millions” (The Daily Beast):This incredible story reminds me of behavioral scientist Dan Ariely’s work showing that those who lie/cheat are the ones who have the most opportunity to do so. And also that one lie easily begets another; dishonesty is a gateway drug. 
•  Schlitterbahn’s Tragic Slide (Texas Monthly): Oh, the ups and downs of this story are kind of heartbreaking, and for some reason feel quintessentially American. 
• “Sleep Science” (National Geographic): A good, multimedia overview of the state of sleep science. I found particularly alarming the specific numbers around how much longer (on average) devices keep us awake, even my beloved Kindle Paperwhite! 

PODCASTS  

• Gimlet’s Startup mini-series on “church planting” (founding new churches) is really excellent. The last episode is so beautifully vulnerable, it slays me.  
• The This American Life episode 654: “The Feather Heist” sounds boring but is actually amazing; it unravels a strange and dark underworld, hints at a broken court system, takes a visit into the anonymous depravity of online forums, and finally leaves you wondering a bit at the nature of being human. 

THAILAND | and also fake news...

 LOCAL STORIES

• Four Reigns by Kukrit Fadiman - A sweeping multigenerational tale of a minor courtier (and her family/friends) in the Thai royal palace, from childhood to old age - over the course of 4 kings, from the late 19th century to mid 20th century. It was a pretty breezy read, kind of like Buddhist royal gossip - but as an outsider, gave an interesting view on how a Thai author-journalist characterized his society, proper social roles (esp vis-a-vis Confucianism), royalty, and interactions with the foreign (farang ) world. There was a simplicity to the book that was kind of rewarding - kind of like when tidying up, and everything fits in its place. (All the characters, especially the protagonist, acted as they should , in conformity to their rather simplistic characters and Buddhist social mores.) That said, it was also kind of frustrating: people weren’t really open to change, and the protagonist feels annoyingly unfeminist (to the contemporary western reader) - her role is to serve her husband and family, she self deprecatingly says she cannot understand politics or finances, etc. 
• Sighteeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (h/t Ashley B) - I read these short stories years ago and remember it as uneven. Werner read it this time and mostly agreed. Maybe give a pass. 

LONGFORM 

I actually haven’t read anything I’ve LOVED enough to recommend, with one singular (and important!) exception:

• Truth, Disrupted (Harvard Business Review) - SUCH a good article. A group of MIT researchers recently published their findings on how “false news” travels on Twitter. (Scholarly article from Science magazine is unfortunately behind a paywall.) Luckily, this HBR piece is a great companion/follow-up article looking at: (A) why truth matters (sounds obvious, but they make points I hadn’t thought of before); (B) how false news spreads (with interesting tidbits like: false news spreads faster than true news, this speed differential is due to humans not bots, and is despite the fact that false news often originates with poorly networked accounts); and (C) what we can do about it, as tech companies/designers, policy makers, and general citizen consumers. I had SO MANY aha moments from this. 

Long form!

Countries visited: Austria, Thailand (current) 

I didn’t stay in Austria long enough for a “local” read, so instead took a break to catch up on long-form. 

AMERICANA 

• DIY Guns (Wired): Why the publishing of 3D printing gun specs (now protected by First Amendment “free speech” claims), renders all gun restrictions as we know them obsolete. Also: a brilliant library plan. 
• “Whatever’s your darkest question, you can ask it here” (California Sunday): On how the original pro-choice campaign fought for medically safe abortions, over at-Home care, leaving behind a socioeconomic segment that just can’t afford hospital abortions. Made me consider, for the first time, why we don’t have the abortion equivalent of midwives. 
• Jimmy Carter for Higher Office (GQ): A profile of a former President, whose underrated optimism and commitment to public service may be just what we need now 
• A Rattle with Death in Yosemite (Outside): A fascinating account of a near-fatal rattlesnake bite. I learned a lot about snakes and snakebites. For instance: A single vial of anti-venom can cost $18,000, and by the time he reached the hospital, he needed 18 vials. 

MAKE TECH GREAT AGAIN

• Bias Detectives (Nature): A great introductory account of how difficult it is to build algorithms that are “fair” and how researchers are trying to deal with this (use human checks, define metrics of “fairness” beforehand, and avoid black-box models). 
•  “I was devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Internet, has some regrets (Vanity Fair): On how Berners-Lee is trying to create a decentralized Internet. (It’s like Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley!!)

MONEY MATTERS

•  The Brexit Short (Bloomberg): Hedge funds are making bank from getting private UK exit polling data earlier, and then betting on GBP currency swings. As genius as it is nefarious. So whoever said (incorrect) exit polls are now worthless in the Brexit/Trump age, clearly don’t understand FX markets. 
• John Lanchester: After the Fall (LRB): 10 years on from the great Recession of 2008 - a great, simple overview of the lessons we haven’t learned, the structural changes we haven’t made, and why they matter. 
• Pay the Homeless (Longreads): Oy, I still don’t know the ethics of this situation, but I feel like this article called out a lot of my behavior/excuses in helpful ways. 
• ...as an Internet celebrity: Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer (New Yorker): I had so many contrasting feels about this one: voyeuristically enjoyable, wtf Internet/society do we live in, SWATing as both genius/hilarious and terribly wasteful/dangerous, and also does it mean I am old that I don’t understand the appeal f live streaming anything? #turning30

IRELAND

Countries visited: Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland (UK)

IRISH STORIES  

•  Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody (h/t Padraig) - A gorgeous, earnest, and culturally evocative memoir of what it was like to grow up as an intellectual woman in Catholic Ireland, with the nationalist movement happening in the background. This had such a strong sense of place and time that I often felt transported.
• Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney - Okay so technically I read this a few months ago, but only on this trip did I realize it was by an Irish author! This book read like a literary version of HBO’s Girls - a take on millennial female friendships through university and your early 20s, complete with intellectual posturing, conversations overripe with imbued meaning, and age-inappropriate relationships. Basically, you spend most of the book being like, Oh god don’t do that, but of course because they’re in their early 20s, they do it anyway. I loved it. 

Local theatre geekery:

• Sharon at the Bewley Cafe Theatre - An earnest, sweet version of the female “searching for self in your 20s” theme. Not breaking any new ground, but had excellent dialogue and talented actors. I imagine it’ll do the European Fringe circuits. 
• Ulysses at the Abbey Theatre - Confession time: I have never read Ulysses nor do I have any pressing to do so. I figured watching it as a play would be like a shortcut. WRONG. Apparently Ulysses is mad complicated, though an intermission Sparknotes skim did help sort me out. My main layman’s takeaways: 1) Whoa that was pretty raunchy and I totally get why the Catholic Church hated it, and 2) Theatres in the Round are both so cool and also quite impractical. 

Also: So many popular contemporary authors are Irish! For example, did you know David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue are both Irish?

STORIES FROM “HOME” 

• Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist (NYT Magazine) - When ecological science and politics collide. Best sentence: “A wolf, in this debate, is always much bigger than a wolf. ‘Wolves are Democrats,’ I was told more than once; they symbolize Big Government and regulation and all the ways that distant bureaucrats and coastal elites want to destroy the cherished rural ranching culture of the West.”
•  The Lifespan of a Lie (Medium) - On the media maneuverings of Prof Zimbardo, to spread the alluring (but false) “lessons” of the Stanford Prison Experiment, potentially paving the way for an American prison system focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation. 
• Vice Media was Built on a Bluff (NY Mag)  - All I can say is: Holy shit. And also: 100% that this will become a Hollywood movie someday. 

CROATIA

 Travels: Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina (for about 30 mins), Croatia 

LOCAL IS LEKKER  

• I read Dubravka Ugresic’s  The Ministry of Pain about a Croatian exiled to Amsterdam after the “Homeland War.” It reads weirdly breezily - and in part I suspect that’s the point: that tragedy can pass so breezily, with matter-of-fact observation. But there’s plenty of dark humor underlying everything (she gets a job as a professor teaching “Yugoslavian literature”; she notes that the farther her countrymen travel West, the farther East — ie in Asian/Middle Eastern enclaves— they end up), and a little bit of nonchalant violence too. In general, I liked but didn’t love the book. Here’s  The Guardian ’s review, which is pretty glowing. 
• Werner read Girl at War from Croatian-American author Sara Novic. He rates it as “good not great.” He would still recommend it to someone traveling in Croatia, as it was a fast read that whets your appetite to read more about the conflict. From the book, you only see one perspective, framed as “us vs them.”

 THE WORLD IS FLAT

• Some of my favorite parts of traveling are learning how ideas or symbols get transplanted across the world, and imputed with different meaning. In Croatia, we started seeing. American Confederate flags everywhere — only to learn that the symbol of the American South (and slavery) has come to be the flag for the Souhern Croatian football team. Seriously. 
• Bit late, but for the Saffers: in Egypt, we learned that Zamalek is a football team. In South Africa, Zamalek refers to a Black Label beer. But according to Urban Dictionary, it’s because Zamalek once beat South Africa so badly that the name began to equate to meaning “strong” and “able to give an ass kicking.” How great is that?! Also, what PR company decides that a great way to market their beer is to emphasize what a failure the national football team is?! ❤️🇿🇦
• Did you know that mainland Croatia consists of two land masses that don’t connect? To get from the capital Zagreb to Dubrovnik (of Game or Thrones fame), you have to go through Bosnia? This got me looking into whether there are spots in the US (apart from Alaska) where you have to travel through Canada to get to, and there are! They are known as “exclaves” - here’s an amusing blog post on one near Vermont and info on another more sizable one by Washington. 

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

• For Spanish speakers: Radio Ambulante’s episode on “Narco Tours,” hosted by a paisa (someone from Medellín) was really well done. I didn’t learn anything new, and it didn’t surprise me, but it was just so well told and produced, and raises good questions around the ethics of shows like Narcos. That moment when the tour guide asks the German guy if they do similar tours following in the footsteps of Hitler? Audio gold. 
• Hidden Brain episode: “Romeo and Juliet in Kigali” looks at interventions designed by a Holocaust survivor (turned prof), that tries to change sectarian norms or beliefs in Rwanda. It also raises questions around what it means if mass behavior can be “easily” changed by media. (It doesn’t go so far as to link back to media conglomeration in the US, or growth team work at social media companies, but you can extrapolate).

ITALY etc | Local stories

First, an addendum to Egypt: My favorite book I’ve read in a while was the surprisingly laugh-out-loud yet sweet Less by Andrew Sean Greer - the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner. I don’t normally like light reads (and neither does the Pulitzer committee), but 🤷🏻‍♀️.

Now onto the travel reads! So Werner and I have decided to  try to read books written by authors from our travel countries (anywhere we stay at least a week in). So all posts from here on will probably include some of that. Note that the local read is the ONLY thing that might not be a “true” recommendation. Everything else is stuff I’ve really loved.

1. LOCAL STORIES:  

So far we’ve visited: Italy, Spain, Malta, Slovenia - and just arrived in Croatia today! 

• Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Italy) - I’ve always intended to read Eco, but sort of in the same way I intent to watch art cinema and instead watch the latest superhero movie. Sooo, despite the book’s plot summary (or its Hollywood movie version) - it is NOT a riveting murder mystery. That said, I learned a LOT about medieval times, Catholic politics, and theology (what makes a Franciscan, Dominican, and Benedictine monk different from each other? Now I too know this arcane fact). It did in fact make me think about cathedrals differently as we walked through them. But I’m also glad I’m done with  it now :)
• Daphne and the Two Maltas - BBC Assignment podcast (Malta) - Interesting piece to ponder as I walked around one of the prettiest cities I’ve ever been to. (Truly, get yourself to Valleta ASAP.)
• Belated Egypt one:  Cairo, A Type of Love Story (h/t Urmila) - Hilarious take by an expat American journalist in Egypt (though, full disclosure, Werner has read this guy’s books on living in China and finds him to be an “asshole” and “condescending”). 

2. HOME STORIES 

(...because wherever we go, we probably still gravitate towards American / South African stories.)  

•  James Fallows on the Reinvention of America: I know some friends who love Fallows, and every once in a while, I read something by him that makes me understand why. This is smart and hopeful (didn’t you think that was an oxymoron?) and full of wonky love for change at the local government/politics level. 
• The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul -  Reading this made me feel really, really old and out of it. I did not know Juul was a verb. I did not know about any of these Instagram memes. I did not know about it’s popularity nor cache among youth (a term which no longer describes my age bracket). And I did not know there was mounting scientific evidence about the negative health effects of vaping. Def read if you are as ignorant as I was.  

3. UNRELATED RECS

• The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse Racing Code   - I loved this for its perfect nerdiness (getting your data model perfect, solving a puzzle), and Werner loved it for the brilliant arbitrage. 

Next up: Ireland, Thailand. Hit me up if you’ve got local reading/listening recommendations! 

EGYPT | Unrelated recs

LOOKING TO JAPAN

• How to kill a fish (Topic) - Why and how we should kill fish more humanely (as they do in Japan?), for animal rights, taste, and commercial reasons (fish who die by asphyxiation on ice release more lactic acid, so taste worse and can keep for up to 1 month less before going bad).
• Japanese Rent-A Family Industry (New Yorker) - I didn’t know this was a thing (and has been for decades), but in Japan, you can rent actors to pretend to be your family member, boss, or significant other - for all kinds of reasons that at first seem crazy but also kind of genius.

IMMIGRANT DREAMS, IMMIGRANT LIES

• The Great high school impostor (GQ) - The GQ features desk consistently churns out some of my favorite long-form. This one is no exception. The story of a heartbreaking double life, a failed protagonist, the optimism of youth, and indiscriminate international border laws.
• Germany’s refugee detectives (The Atlantic) - Inside the secretive department in charge of vetting whether someone gets refugee status, where simple lies can reveal truths, and a machine can detect your true native language(s).

BIG TECH // TECH BUGS

• Palantir knows everything about you (Bloomberg)- The obligatory article about the dangers of building big data based on human flaws, and the arrogance of big tech / Pieter Thiel. The part about the gang member repository just slays me. 

POLITICAL GAMES

• The Gamblers betting against Donald Trump (The Ringer) - There are people who bet on political outcomes, as their full time jobs - particularly exploiting the news/political bubbles that drive people’s (namely Trump supporters’) incorrect expectations of the future. 

FARM MURDERS AND SOUTH AFRICAN VIGILANTISM

• Midlands (book) - An old one (from 2000), but shockingly little has changed since then. Journalist Jonny Steinberg follows the story of the unsolved murder of a white farmer’s son, in a town on the geographic edge of the white/black divide in KwaZulu-Natal. A depressing read in which everyone is morally culpable and also totally understandable. 
   
• A more updated and perhaps uplifting story:  Give Back The Land (BBC The Documentary podcast). Would have liked to hear a bit more about other models of redistribution (eg profit share) - but I think the protagonist does a good job explaining the dilemma from the perspective of a liberal white South African: I know I should not keep stolen goods (it IS actually that simple), but I also can’t bear to get rid of it.