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Slippery abalone
Growing up on the United States’ Atlantic coast, I had no experience of abalone. The eastern seaboard of the US is one of the few coastlines in the world where abalone do not exist. It is one of...
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Sushi and the modern man
What is work? What is passion? What is honor? These are some of the themes explored in the film “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, a documentary about the very top restaurant in Japan for it, Sukiyabashi Jiro,...
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Burmese Days for Myanmar nationalists
Burton Levin was the United States’ last ambassador to Burma, serving from 1987 to 1990, witnessing the short-lived political spring that saw the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi, the bloody repression of...
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Phat Thai
My visit to Chiang Mai is a rapidly fading set of memories – one of which looms large. Very large. And that is: there are a lot of fat people in Chiang Mai. And I don’t mean the tourists. Perspective...
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The myth of the drinking writer
I came across this good article, “Why do writers drink?”, from the Guardian (via Joe Studwell’s blog). It was a pleasure to read, given my literary heroes were famous drinkers: Raymond Chandler, Ernest...
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Going Dutch gone
Well, it was bound to happen. Elmore Leonard, aka Dutch, passed away, a gnarly 87, working on yet another novel. Whether Leonard will be missed is a question for his friends and family; but the books...
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Siam
Crime writing blog The Rap Sheet has a regular series about “forgotten books”, in which authors recommend books that influenced them. They published my entry, which may surprise some people who know my...
View ArticleBang Pa-In
The term ‘soft power’ is relatively new, coined by Harvard’s Joseph Nye in 1990 to refer to a country’s ability to influence others through its own cultural and social attractiveness, rather than...
View ArticleMyanmar’s political future
The reform movement in Myanmar has set off an argument about which approach by the international community has been the correct one: sanctions or acceptance. Mathew Davies, a research fellow at the...
View ArticleThe Korean War
Bruce Cumings has written a beautiful, disturbing and powerful history of the Korean conflict, whose origins he sets in the early 1930s and the story of which continues today on a tragically divided...
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