San Francisco to Los Angeles on two wheels.

24 hours of being totally unplugged feels like a mini-vacation — During this eternal sped-up slo-mo spring, I’ve been oscillating between feverish bursts of productivity and glassy-eyed inertia. I’ve managed (just about) to stay on top of deadlines, but with a media diet that has left precious little energy or inclination to tackle Worthwhile Things during the time that’s become available…

A shocking lack of diversity at “The Economist” is damaging the publication’s credibility — Of the many things that stand out in Pankaj Mishra’s masterful New Yorker review of Alexander Zevin’s Liberalism at Large, a history of The Economist since it began publishing in 1843, was this: The staff, predominantly white, is recruited overwhelmingly from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and a disproportionate…

The mind-altering power of being in nature without your smartphone — In spite of months ago having abandoned social media and deleted my phone’s news apps, I still seem to be bombarded by dispiriting news. In my birth country, South Africa, I only so much as have to glance at the front of a newspaper to see headlines about rapes in…

The City of Angels is, by turns, enchanting and infuriating — I’m not sure when I first fell for Los Angeles. Was it when I watched LA Confidential? Or read Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man? Or started following lifeserial (back when I was still on Instagram)? Regardless, when I finally met the city in person — back in 2015 — my…

Two weeks of physical labour left me with far more than just dirt under my fingernails — From Glasgow to the Scottish island of Jura it’s half-an-hour by helicopter. Not having one of those at my disposal, though, it takes me most of the day to get there. First, a large bus winding along moody lochs and around mountains to Kennacraig. Then…

The land of good food and the great outdoors — Seattle, my first taste of the Pacific Northwest, was a good place to start: a sprawling, vibrant, multicultural city surrounded by water. Given that it’s home to some of the world’s biggest brands — including Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks — it was not surprising that cranes and jackhammering were…

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is a startlingly powerful portrait of the immigrant experience — and an unflinching dissection of tragedy and trauma, large and small. — Every so often you read a novel that leaves you a little breathless. A novel so darn good that it haunts you like a bruised rib, reminding you of the power of fiction, the potential it has to move, connect, provoke, and bear witness.