January 29, 2012
I thought I’d share some of my memories of my travels in Pakistan in the spring of 1992. Many of the places I visited would now be completely off-limits to an American traveling alone.
November 8, 2018
Published in The New York Review, November 8, 2018: World War I Relived Day by Day by Patrick Chovanec Four years ago, I went to war. Like many of the people whose stories I followed in my daily “live-tweets” on World War I, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What began […]
April 30, 2019
Before leaving for Italy, our family watched an episode of “Chef’s Table” on Netflix devoted to Dario Cecchini, a butcher in the small town of Panzano in the Chianti region south of Florence. So we looked up him up on the internet and, luckily, were able to book a reservation at his restaurant, attached to […]
April 29, 2019
On our trip to Italy over Easter, I took the family to a small village outside Greve in Chianti (south of Florence) for a family cooking class. It took place in the home of Stefania Balducci. Our first sight when we walked in her door was the table set for the meal we would create with her help.
July 25, 2019
In July 2019, I became aware that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing was approaching. Using the Lego Saturn V rocket my children had bought me for my birthday that year, I demonstrated for them the different stages of the mission. I started live-tweeting the photos and timeline of events I had […]
November 18, 2018
Prompted by my trip there in November 2018, I’m going to do two history posts on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). I’ll begin with the ancient history … and it goes way back. Because modern humans – and before that, the ancestors of humans – almost […]
June 8, 2018
From a series of Twitter threads posted in June 2018: Welcome to Chernobyl, Ukraine, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident on April 26, 1986. I’ve come here on a special day-tour from Kyiv. The site is about 62 miles north of Ukraine’s capital, about 10 miles from the border with Belarus. At the start […]
August 13, 2018
From August 2018 A visit to the German Tank Museum in Munster, Lower Saxony – about an hour outside of Hamburg. The quote on the wall says “He who wants peace, talk of war”. Replica of a German A7V tank from World War I. The only genuine surviving article is in Australia. Inside the German […]
November 17, 2018
Debre Damo, sitting atop a mesa in Tigray, is one of Ethiopia’s oldest Christian monasteries, dating back to the 6th Century AD. According to legend, the saint Abuna Aregawi found his way to the summit when a snake lowered its tail for him to climb. The mountaintop monastery of Debre Damo, seen from a distance. […]
November 18, 2018
From November 2018. Getting ready to climb to the rock-hewn churches of Maryam Korkor and Daniel Korkor atop this butte in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. (You can just spot the latter as a tiny shadow near the top of the second bulge from the left). It was already a hike to get here, following footpaths between […]