A brief Veterans Day special today, as I try and dedicate a strong eight hours to the book. I was planning on directing your attention to this excellent site, which honors the men and women of the 335th Station Hospital in Tagap Ga—the Burmese hamlet where so much Now the Hell Will Start action goes […]
Tags:Burma·Kachin Rangers·Kachins·OSS Detachment 101·Veterans Day·World War II
The section of the book I’m working on today is basically a brief history of terrible kidnapping plots. They’re not all necessarily dumb crimes from the get-go—many of the cases I cover involved months of careful planning by above-average crooks. But they inevitably make one key error that unspools the entire enterprise. And more often […]
Tags:crime·kidnapping
Strange YouTube journey this morning as I sought some quickie material for a reporting day. Inspired by Dr. Swerve-On’s latest installment of Fresh Produce, I started off looking for George Benson’s version of “California Dreaming.” Yet I somehow ended up fixated on the video above, in which Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu pays a visit to […]
Tags:dictatorship·Kim Il-sung·Nicolae Ceausescu·North Korea·Pyongyang·Romania
Given that I’m all about narrative arc these days, Barnaby Barford is an artist who’s right up my alley. He uses his ceramic skills to tell stories, and his latest project is a doozy—a modern update on A Rake’s Progress that recounts an English lottery winner’s rise and fall. One moment our protagonist is sitting […]
Tags:A Rake's Progress·art·Barnaby Barford·Britain·lotteries
In most corners of the world, graffiti artists operate in fear of being nabbed for vandalism. In totalitarian Fiji, they face far more serious charges, at least if their scrawled messages carry the whiff of the political: A New Zealand businessman is in custody in Fiji along with four others who have been arrested over […]
Tags:civil rights·dictatorship·Fiji·Frank Bainimarama·graffiti·law·sedition
Spending today sifting through an absolute treasure trove of primary-source documents, which is why you’ll have to make do with some Algerian chanteusery instead of the usual polymathic mish-mash. Though I can’t yet reveal the exact nature of the documents I’m examining, I can tell you one thing they’ve taught me so far: Kim Il-sung […]
There’s a terrific old episode of Cops—yes, Cops—in which the Miami police round up a bunch of streetwalkers in advance of Super Bowl XXIX. What’s so surprising about the operation is how up front the police are about their objective—namely, to present the game’s attendees with a prostitute-free version of the city. In the episode’s […]
I love this whole approach of picking apart successful yarns to figure out what makes them work. To get myself in the book-writing mindset, I’ve been doing likewise with a bunch of great stories from my formative years—things that have managed to stick with me all these decades later. It’s probably no great shock for […]
Tags:Ernest Hemingway·fame·football·Percy Howard·sports·Sports Illustrated·Super Bowl
With roughly six months to go ’til my first book is due, you can expect plenty more research extras in the coming weeks. A lot of those posts will be designed to help me think through some of the slippery issues I’m encountering as I shape the central narrative—I’m still struggling to understand the mindsets […]
Tags:crime·Detroit·Dwight Johnson·Medal of Honor·military·psychology·Vietnam War
In honor of Halloween—and in deference to the fact that I gotta split early today for trick-or-treating—I’m once again paying homage to the cinematic evildoer who caused me countless childhood nightmares: undead utopian cult leader Reverend Henry Kane. I dare you to come up with a more terrifying horror-flick villain—the man oozes menace out of […]
So easy to forget what a high degree of transportation safety we’ve reached here in the United States. I’m not talking purely in terms of vehicle safety—we also are fortunate to have law and order in areas surrounding roads. The lack of that sort of security is what enables folks to blockade entire Indian states, […]
How long is a public expected to wait before it can see its national traumas depicted on the silver screen? Here in the U.S.A., that estimated time period seems to get shorter with each passing generation: While over a decade passed between the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the debut of Platoon, there […]
Nearly two years ago, I posted about the exorbitant prices of anti-venom, which seem largely due to the reluctance of pharmaceutical manufacturers to service such a relatively small market. The end result of those companies’ economic sensibility is a dearth of medication in Papua New Guinea, where snake bites are a serious public-health problem: In […]
Tags:antivenin·Australia·medicine·Papua New Guinea·public health·snakes
Last day to take advantage of a sweet childcare situation. Trying to churn out a good thousand words worth of book between now and 5 p.m.—four thousand words less than Sinclair Lewis produced during his eight-hour writing stretches, but we can’t all be geniuses. Back soon with the delectable stuff; in the meantime, I once […]
I am sure that hunting alligators on the Bayou is an especially tricky way to make one’s living. But according to this profile of a lady far tougher than I’ll ever be, the vocation is at least somewhat easier if you have the good fortune to belong to a favored family: Victoria Bouvier, a 41-year-old […]
The world economy isn’t only roiled by the machinations of Wall Streeters who are too clever by half; old-fashioned strikes can still upset the delicate equilibrium between prosperity and chaos. An excellent case in point is the ongoing fracas at the Freeport’s Grasberg mine in the restive Indonesian province of Papua. The operation is the […]
Apologies for not keeping up with Microkhan like I should these past few days. Just too wrapped up trying to make progress on the book, which is coming along in fits and starts that occur all-too-rarely. I’m now challenging myself to have 25,000 words done before Halloween; otherwise, I fear that too many nights of […]
Tags:India·The Next Book
Advocates for limited government appear to have a new icon in Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister, who appears to subscribe to Ronald Reagan’s fabled view on the public sector. Just check out what she’s doing at Nigeria’s ports, where an alphabet soup of government agencies have been fleecing importers and exporters alike for ages: […]
On a Wired deadline today, so just offering a taste of what’s to come this week—a tangential bit of art peeled off from a newly developed interest in the Torres Strait Islands independence movement. I was hoping to track down an example of the baizam, or shark dance, which features the most awesome headdresses you’ve […]
Buried in this alarming account of crooked Brooklyn cops is a brief aside about how New York City is settling up with the scandal’s victims. Dozens, if not hundreds of men were falsely imprisoned after having drugs planted on them by police striving to hit their monthly arrest quotas. How much money do those men […]
I’m almost ashamed to admit how much time I’ve wasted over the past few days sifting through this nifty archive of World War II “newsmaps,” which were essentially weekly progress updates published by the Army’s Special Service Division. Though tinged with the air of propaganda—it’s not like they ever reported on setbacks, and the enemy […]
Tags:art·Iran·maps·propaganda·World War II
Though the Faroe Islands are inhabited by less than 50,000 souls, the Danish dependency boasts its very own professional soccer league—one that includes four separate tiers of prestige, topped by the premier-level Vodafonedeildin. As this excellent photo set demonstrates, even the league’s most elite teams don’t draw enormous crowds—though, granted, the humans in those images […]
Tags:David Asare·Faroe Islands·Ghana·immigration·Ivory Coast·soccer·sports
I’m going to labor under the delusion that y’all have Columbus Day off, even though I don’t. Here’s to hoping that you, unlike the sizable Microkhan team, get to spend the next 24 hours doing something that brings the utmost joy to you hearts.
Tags:Afrobeat·Ghana·music·Pierre Antoine
One of the main keys to writing a non-fiction book is resisting the urge to go off on non-essential research tangents. Nothing breaks your rhythm like spending a needless 25 minutes delving into the world of, say, Soviet helicopter design when you really should be focusing on character development. It is to my great discredit, […]
One of those days in which I’ve got to wrestle a chapter to the ground, lest it come to occupy too much real estate in my head. Back tomorrow with something worthwhile.
Tags:Vietnam War
I’ve been slowly pulling together a post about the Iban alphabet, a rather convoluted form of written communication that is nonetheless making a comeback in a small corner of Borneo. In researching the esoteric matter, I came across this excellent illustrated document regarding the funerary rites of the so-called Sea Dayaks, who really know how […]
Pesky facts keep getting in the way of my book’s smooth narrative. Take the lovely paragraph I crafted yesterday, in which I argued that no one in the West believed that Cold War refugees could possibly flow toward the Soviet Bloc. An earlier experiment with such migration had ended tragically, after all, and that was […]
Tags:Charles Lucas·Cold War·Communism·defectors·East Germany
During this past week’s procrastinatory idylls, I had a chance to read two very different accounts of how folks deal with the fallout of fame. The first was an excerpt from an upcoming biography of the late Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, a man who basically apart after his playing career was over. His […]
Tags:fame·football·Mark Hamill·movies·Star Wars·Walter Payton
For all but dedicated observers of southern African politics, King Mswati III of Swaziland is known primarily for his polygamous lifestyle and its attendant chaos. But the absolute monarch deserves scorn not for his libertinism, but rather the absolutely atrocious way he has handled Swaziland’s public finances. Mswati’s financial recklessness is the reason his nation […]
Tags:business·corruption·crime·economics·King Mswati III·Swaziland
Big writing day—if I don’t get this chapter out the door by Sunday morning, the whole house of cards may come tumbling down. Back tomorrow with something choice.
Tags:Dee Edwards·music·R&B
