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No author of speculative fiction wants to be proven right. To be proven right in the spec-fic game is to see the worst come to pass. No, speculative fiction is written as a warning, and the crow of “I told
When Vietnam elects its National Assembly this weekend, voters will find that, by and large, the choice has already been made for them. The country’s ruling Communist Party blocked more than one hundred independent nominees from running—an unprecedented number whose
It is one of the most common sights on the streets of Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, Da Lat and Nha Trang, tourists abound whose style might best be described as ‘communist chic’. You will have seen
I had fallen in with an Emirates flight crew—British, Irish, South African, Korean—sometime after eleven. A Swedish stewardess, the eldest among them at a mere thirty-something, watched her charges’ increasingly drunken antics with a wry smile and a half-concealed yawn
Americans are often pleasantly surprised, upon arriving in Vietnam for the first time, by how little the Vietnamese seem to care about the war these days. They might feel a pang of guilt or two, or else an off-putting sense
Beloved of idealistic young things everywhere, The West Wing was always famous for the way in which it sought to imagine an alternative or counter presidency to that of George W. Bush, who came to power during the show’s second
Has it really been forty years since there wasn’t enough room on the last chopper out? The streets of Ho Chi Minh City are, if not exactly festooned, then at least rather heavily decorated with banners and other displays attesting
As I have travelled around Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey these past few weeks, covering the lead-up to and aftermath of last weekend’s presidential election, I have been continually reminded of the last country in which I undertook such a project.