All Borderlands Are Ghost Lands

WATCHING TELEVISION FOOTAGE OF REFUGEES streaming west by their thousands, along the highways of Hungary toward the Austrian border, my first thoughts are about my mother. She made a similar trek, 69 years ago almost to the day, when she was only six. I see her in the girl raised by her father above the fray at the Bicske railway station in Budapest, or holding tight onto her mother’s hand in the throngs filling a nighttime road, led by men using their cellphone GPS to find the way. She too was fleeing war — or more exactly, walking through the heart of it, as what had been the Indian Raj was violently split into India and Pakistan.

Read the full article over at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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“This is war!” — the Greeks on Crete are angry, and here’s why

I’m proud to have an essay up on VICE, all written in this last week in the heat of the fallout from the Greek referendum and the (perhaps) closing of a deal with the creditors. If you want to know what’s happening in one small part of Greece right now, please read. Click here for the article, or on the image below.Screen Shot 2015-07-18 at 1.42.37 PM

Paleochora from the Hills

When I first arrived in Crete last year, despite the ongoing economic crisis, times felt better, much freer, and few people were talking about the crisis all the time. That’s changed since then, unfortunately, so here’s a glimpse back to those first months I spent here, courtesy of the wonderful people at Split Lip Magazine. Read it here, or click the image below.Screen Shot 2015-07-15 at 11.21.12 AM