The fifty or so buildings on the sprawling Fox Studio lot in Beverly Hills, California, take three primary shapes: the sleek glass and steel of the executive offices in the southeast corner, the giant airport hangar-like sound stages in the middle, and the low-slung two-storey apartment-style production offices along the west edge of the lot. […]

Friday Night, The Levi’s Store, H-Market, Lahore, Pakistan. I’d tried on five pairs of jeans already. Why I needed five pairs of jeans I wasn’t exactly sure. But the Levi’s Signature Editions were eight bucks a pair and they seemed to fit pretty well. They were also taking my mind off things. I’d been having […]

My husband is a liar. When I complain about the wrinkles on my neck, he says, “What wrinkles?” Then I laugh because I don’t want to press the point. Would it be a good idea to have him examine, truly, the decay that is my neck skin? Think wattle. Think chicken with pinfeathers that spring […]

Let’s say you’ve never heard of the Great Bear Rainforest. I never had. Let’s say it’s a theory, a conjecture, a proper noun three words long and as real to you as fabled El Dorado or the moons of Jupiter. There it is in the subject line of a Facebook message: “invite to the great […]

Ever since he had settled in Manila, Cedric Ramanathan’s greatest pleasure had been golf. There was nothing he liked better than to whack a ball down the fairway and then stroll after it with no thought in his head except whether to use a seven-iron or a six for the next shot—the occasional plonk in […]

In the nineteen-eighties I started having recurring nightmares. The nightmare part wasn’t so unusual: like many people, I’d had my fair share of dreams about being swept away by rogue waves, or driving cars that couldn’t make it up steep hills, or flying in airplanes that couldn’t seem to climb any higher than the treetops. […]