This unlikely story is mostly about the immigrant girl, but it started with the immigrant man. And it ended with every country whose bounty and success attract people seeking a better life, because there in front of me was the whole immigration debate in a nutshell: a girl fleeing a country where she was valued less even than the clothes she wore, a new country that took her in, and a local population increasingly fed up with immigrants.
This is Dubai, a cosmopolitan city carved against all odds out of the Arabian Desert — which in turn is almost a million square miles of harsh, barely livable, practically uninhabited vastness. But to look around Dubai you’d think water grows on trees (and you’d think there are trees). Here an outdoor pedestrian mall is…
A man walks down the street staring at his phone, ignoring the world-famous Eiffel Tower rising behind him. What do we ignore in our own lives that other people would travel the world to see?
Kuala Lumpur showcases Malaysia’s harmony and parity among different racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups. At least officially. Off the record and quietly, though,…
“Are you an expert?” I asked. The answer was a lesson for anyone who ever tries to learn anything.
As I toured Kuala Lumpur, I saw various houses of worship, a mosaic of ethnicities, a plethora of restaurants, a cross-section of Asia, an endless supply of shops, and a doozie of a traffic jam. But this photo of Kampung Baru…
I was so proud of my New-York taxi-hailing skills, artfully applied in Kowloon, Hong Kong, of all places. But then when the police got involved…
A magical collection of “luminous ovoids” transforms Hong Kong’s urban landscape at dusk, carving a peaceful, happy, otherworldly retreat into the space between the busy harbor and the even busier skyscrapers that define Hong Kong Island. Here time slows. Adults frolic. Smiles abound. And reality and make-believe mingle. The exhibition is courtesy of teamLab, the…
Perhaps the most striking feature of the shepherd is this: He is happy. “I have no stress,” he says, not boastfully, but rather as though he can’t imagine where stress could possibly come from.
The pier is the nexus between land and water, an invitation to trust your life to a vessel mere “inches from death,” as the Roman poet Juvenal wrote. But it’s worth it. It always has been. Islands are different kinds of places with a different kind of daily life. Hong Kong’s pier is…
I felt like a visitor, even an intruder. And the eeriness of the scene underscored the vastness of our planet and the variety of life on it, and silently asked the question: To whom does our planet belong?
