Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In the Brazilian rainforest there is a town built around a church where worshippers drink hallucinogenic tea. "At the church entrance I was served a cup of the brew. I swigged it down straight away. Then I drank another cup"
For one thing, no more parking spaces. "In peak periods, virtually all cars will be on the roads driving people around. In off-peak periods, cars will still be on the roads, they’ll just pull over to the side of the road and stop"
Hong Kong is in flux once more. "Now a Chinese special administrative region, it is being remade yet again under diamond pressure. And increasingly this city of over seven million inhabitants floats on a growing sense of unease"
American citizen of Palestinian descent flies to Israel, aiming to visit sister in West Bank. On landing in Tel Aviv she faces immigration. Despite best preparations, it doesn't go well. Soon she's sent to the "Arab room"
Walking the Mournes in Northern Ireland. "As we approached the cloud line we met two walkers retreating, mad-eyed and wet. 'It’s wild up there!' one of them yelled. A raven swept out of the cloud and was whipped off by the gale"
Former New Yorker writer excavates history of 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, home for many years of his former magazine and "bastions of the old East Coast Wasp imperium" such as the Algonquin and Harvard Club
Security expert Schneier replies to Sam Harris's call for targeted profiling of Muslims at airports. "Invasive TSA screening is nothing more than security theatre. It doesn’t make us safer, and it’s not worth the cost"
A small plane in China. "When you're in the clouds, it's like driving a car while blindfolded, but worse. In a plane it's simply impossible to tell up from down by your own bodily senses, if you can't see the ground or the horizon"
Desperate for cash in 1981, American Airlines sold first-class unlimited lifetime air tickets for $350,000. A great deal for the buyers, who have been racking up tens of millions of air-miles since. Now AA wants to weasel out
Rust-porn ramble through Mishima's Tokyo: "Unshaven, unshowered Tokyo, Tokyo with its make-up off last thing at night, a place of battered plastic bottles strapped with green duct tape and nylon string around a lamppost"
Italy's business capital. For the grafting Milanese it's "work work work, and frequent breaks for small, sophisticated pleasures—the signor cappuccino before 8 am, and the icy kick of a sparkling spritz aperol when the day is done"
Great metropolis, city of ghosts, wonderful parks, "most successful mongrel casserole anywhere". But not very nice to tourists. "There are, for instance, a dozen inflections of the word sorry. Only one of them means 'I’m sorry'"
"There’s always a fine sadness about Milan’s economic power, as if this isn’t quite what Italians would ever want a city to be"
