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You are caught in a traffic jam in Karachi and a beggar raps on your window. He displays a withered limb or (take your pick) a twitching stump, a bleeding abscess, an arm bent like a question mark, hands with no fingers, a goutish tumor, a cleft lip, a scorched face. The look in his yellowed eyes ...  (Read more)

The following titles are in the display window at London Books, a store in The Point, Karachi’s trendiest shopping mall:

“War of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” by Christopher Hitchens
“Buddha” by Karen Armstrong
“The ...  (Read more)

Just had my first encounter with brain masala. Not a joke. Quite popular in Karachi, and not at all bad; soft in texture and gentle in taste, much like tofu, though high in cholesterol, I’m told.

Most technological breakthroughs are not breakthroughs in all ways; there’s often a drawback of one sort or another. As has been noted widely, PDAs are great but they don’t have the permanence of datebooks. A few years ago I leafed through my grandfather’s datebook from the 1950s; ...  (Read more)

I walked into a drugstore in Islamabad yesterday and noticed, in a proud stack by the cash register, a dozen cans of Slim-Fast. A few yards away, on the street, was a montage of Pakistani misery—street kids, homeless men, hunger. This might be an economic indicator in the era of globalization, though ...  (Read more)

The headline over an opinion piece in The New York Times asks a good question: “Is America Abandoning Afghanistan?” Several thousand U.S. soldiers are in Afghanistan but the country is slipping into chaos and needs ...  (Read more)

I arrived in Islamabad two days ago, and the 16-hour journey from New York gave me the time to begin reading Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” which is a treat. ...  (Read more)

A new book is revising the conventional wisdom about U.S. intervention in Angola during the Cold War. The book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, quotes a former CIA station chief in Angola as saying the 1975 ...  (Read more)

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting is an obligatory stop for the Balkan news crowd; its reports are more detailed than anything else on the Web and written by journalists from the region. IWPR is the only place, online or offline, where ...  (Read more)

Tobias Wolff has written a book review that is crafted as thoughtfully as one of his short stories; it reaches for the soul. Not only does Wolff’s review make you want to read the new collection ...  (Read more)