The Money Goes First
Why money is the first thing they came for.
The Honest Pitch
What a token is, before we argue about it.
The Permission Society
What a deed still means, in a world being rebuilt on ledgers.
The Country That Chose
The Vietnam War and its neighbors: Essay Three The heat comes off the concrete at U-Tapao in a way you can almost see, a wavering in the air above the strip, and through it a small jet from Kunming settles down and taxis toward the terminal. It is an
The Country That Was Not at War
The boy was eight years old. The morning he remembers happened in the rainy season of nineteen ninety-five, on a slope in Xieng Khouang Province, two hours from the provincial capital, on the kind of path villagers had been walking before there was a village. He had gone out
The Tower That Never Opened
Essay one of three. Cambodia. Yim Sreymao opens her shop at five-thirty in the morning, before the cement dust has settled from the night air. She sells rice, fish sauce, condensed milk, plastic sandals, the small inventory that turns over a few dollars a day in a neighborhood that
The War That Did Not End
An introduction to a three-part series on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand
The Mirror Above the Counter
On the question we replaced, and what it cost.
What the Water Shows
The pot is small. What it holds is not.
The Monk Who Would Not Take Sides
Thich Nhat Hanh, 1926–2022, and what his refusal asks of us now.
The Libraries That Burned Twice
On Nalanda, Baghdad, and the Semiconductor Chokepoint Where the World’s Knowledge Now Lives. Nazem Long Arc News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bihar, 1193 The ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara, Bihar. The conqueror stood in
What Lin Zexu Started
On the Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Opium Wars — and What They Ask of Anyone Watching a Chokepoint Close • • • Twenty million people would die because of what happened in those trenches. But in June 1839, standing on the shore at Humen, the man who ordered the trenches dug could