Longreads

Introducing Travelreads: The Best Storytelling for the Best Places in the World, Presented by Virgin Atlantic One of the coolest things about Longreads is when someone tweets:  “I’m…

Slide Show: Asia's New Silk Road When geography changes -- as when the Suez Canal joined Europe to the Indian Ocean, or when the railroads transformed the American West and the Russian East…

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. Baka malamig doon were among the few words she said.

When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.

May 19th 2011 | NEW YORK, PARIS AND WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition MARCHED off a plane; arrested; charged with seven…

From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the…