On Washington's Red Line, which may as well be called the White Line as it rumbles below the city's palest quadrant, the atmosphere is discernibly different. It is all rustling of newspapers and...

if you're looking to see what the government of Kiribati finally decides to do, when do they wave the flag and say the last good-bye, I'm afraid I can't help you. But look around, follow the news,...

They say that you can never go home again. You look for everything to be the same and when you find that things have changed, you are left reeling, crestfallen and dazed.

In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine {old women} are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things...

Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. live been there. l met both of them.

I had read the book 1421-The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course

I treated the wound with antibiotic cream and let it close before doing any serious snorkeling-and incidentally, I do very much like the phrase serious snorkeling. If I could somehow figure out a way...

There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we're in. Then there's another faction that believes George Bush...

...remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm {which I think counts in Chinese}, the linguistic powers...

the television news paused for a commercial--Coming up next: Are we all going to die Tomorrow?

the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time

1989 played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy--Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to...

There will be no fucking sunsets in the pages that follow.

Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks because it makes other people less boring.

The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself...

Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise...

i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.

I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most...