Essay one of three. Cambodia. Yim Sreymao opens her shop at five-thirty in the morning, before the cement dust has settled from the night air. She sells rice, fish sauce, condensed milk, plastic sandals, the small inventory that turns over a few dollars a day in a neighborhood that used
An introduction to a three-part series on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand
On the question we replaced, and what it cost.
The pot is small. What it holds is not.
Thich Nhat Hanh, 1926–2022, and what his refusal asks of us now.
On Nalanda, Baghdad, and the Semiconductor Chokepoint Where the World’s Knowledge Now Lives. Nazem Long Arc News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bihar, 1193 The ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara, Bihar. The conqueror stood in the
On the Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Opium Wars — and What They Ask of Anyone Watching a Chokepoint Close • • • Twenty million people would die because of what happened in those trenches. But in June 1839, standing on the shore at Humen, the man who ordered the trenches dug could
Bengal, 1943, and the Architecture of Starvation
How the 1953 removal of Mosaddegh set a structural precedent for everything that followed — from the Islamic Revolution to the ghost fleets drifting dark in the Gulf today.
How an Actuarial Calculation Closed the Strait of Hormuz
Read slowly. The building has no windows on the side that faces the river. I don’t know why I noticed that first — maybe because the man walking into it had spent three years building something whose entire promise was transparency. Dario Amodei walked into the Pentagon one day in
The Moment Morality Reclaimed the Stage at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 Reports say the chair sat empty. That was the thing people noticed first — before the speeches, before the pledges, before the Delhi Declaration. An empty seat in the front row of the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi,