The white-haired man cruised along the emptying thoroughfare as the falling sun swam in red over the neighbouring nation. He enjoyed the push of wind through his hair and the dampish chill of the December air on his hands as he drove his open sided wartime jeep. His wife had gone ahead in the far more modern family car.

Sensational and superficial reports on North Korea drown out far more important voices.

There are those who condemn Dennis Rodman for "ignoring North Korea's human rights crisis"; and there are those who condemn those condemnations by invoking "the hypocrisy of the US", arguing that ‘politics must be kept separate from sports and cultural exchanges’, or proposing that ‘this is the kind of engagement we need more of, because our demonization of North Korea is getting us nowhere.’

Does the realism of literature become debatable in exotic settings? Do unfamiliar locales and characters notionally give writers license to invent and dissemble? Did Conrad or Maugham find it tempting to cut corners on truth, knowing their readers were unlikely to visit the Sulu Archipelago or The Moluccan islands?

For several reasons, one involving a past Australian Prime Minister, I am very deaf. I organise my life around the ear that can hear, directing seating at the table as Fellini did his actors. Unless I can see a sound, it’s hard for me to learn it, much less replicate it.

So I have not learned Lao. The inflection, tones and sounds are so intricate that I am terrified of saying, ‘Hello, my name is penis’ … or ‘I have very dense pubic hair’ … which is what one can say inadvertently when responding to the comment: ‘You look tired.’

When mobs take to the streets and violence looms, the world pays attention. No matter how closely these events are covered, our perceptions of them are coloured by distance, geopolitics and cultural stereotyping.  Thus a mob seeking to bring down a government in one part of the world threatens democracy, while a similar action by a mob in another part of the world is seeking to protect democracy.  It’s the same thing with terrorism: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The Vientiane traffic clotted and crawled as it does in when there has been a crash.  I felt a creeping sense of dread as I sat sweating at the wheel of my own collision- and sun-scarred car. 

As we inched forward, the evidence of a motor bike crash began to appear: shards of red plastic splinters from tail lights, and the vivid red of arterial blood thickening and already blackening at the edges.  A tiny, greying padded bra lay amongst the wreckage. One shoulder strap was torn and blood stained. I had no idea if the wearer was still alive.

As I boarded the small plane in Chicago in December 2012, I looked around suspecting that everyone was a writer. It was my second time to go to Iowa City.

Last Friday I had to go to a “Western” restaurant and bar, part of a chain, across from campus to tell Miko good-bye.

The news of Yolanda triggered in me a delayed reaction to Sandy, another super storm a year earlier, which hit Long Beach, Long Island directly and devastated the small barrier island where my grandmother had a beach house and where I spent all my summers from infancy to the age of eighteen.  But I have memories of Tacloban, too, though not as vivid as those of Long Beach.  I spent a night there a few years ago on my return from the town of Balangiga in Samar, where I was researching a story for The Wall Street Journal.   What rises up out memory in Tacloban is a street named after