After Caesar’s assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume. Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was…
The Bund’s grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The…
Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it…
Japan has been aging for decades. The country’s birth rate first fell below the replacement rate in 1974, long before phrases like the “demographic transition” and the “silver economy” became commonplace. Now, with many countries rich and small staring at the prospect of an aging population, what’s happening in Japan may now be a leading…
Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab. For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from…
The Warring States Period is one of the most important times in China’s history. It marked the end of one dynasty–the Zhou–and the beginning of a new imperial era, under the Qin. It’s an era that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history: The fall of the…
In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia’s Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth’s coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way. Yet his…
What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries. Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest…
The Springs-and-Autumns period is a strange period in Chinese history. Coming after the decline of the Zhou, and before the famous Warring States Period, this period of Chinese history features a large number of small states with no powerful hegemon, no strong sense of the mandate of heaven, rules of chivalry that wouldn’t seem out…
Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage. He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy,…
The life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, often feels like a spectacle—in no small part due to the 1987 Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor. Yet the true story being Puyi, as well as his wife, the empress Wanrong, is more complicated. Two foreigners were asked to tutor both Puyi and Wanrong: Reginald Johnston and…
Today, we’re welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown, June 2026) moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota; after the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for…
What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump. Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest book The Next China Is Still China: An Insider’s…
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalised work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman…
On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically. Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole…