I just came back from a trip to China, during which I and two friends traveled along the section of the Silk Route that passes through PRC. We started in Luoyang, then went to Xian, made three stops in the Gansu corridor, and finally reached Turpan and Urumqi in Xinjiang. Our main int

I have traveled extensively in southern Africa over the past 25 years—South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and now Namibia. But in all my previous trips I was lucky to see a black rhino only once (in South Africa’s Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park). The problem, of course, is

As a boy growing up in Russia I read a bunch of adventure stories about intrepid explorers traveling to far-off places. In one book a band of adventurers voyaged to the Skeleton Coast to search for diamonds. So one might say that it’s been a long time that I dreamed of visiting this r

I was going to title this post “Living in Singapore” but that wouldn’t be right. Apart from three ventures out to downtown and a nearby residential area, I’ve spent all my time on the Nanyang Technological University campus. Incidentally, “Nanyang”

As many of you know, currently the Seshat Databank project is focused on collecting data for all polities (states, empires, chiefdoms, archaeologically known cultures, etc) that intersected 30 geographic points (NGAs, standing for Natural Geographic Areas) depicted here: So far I have

Last four weeks I’ve been traveling all over Europe. After leaving Vienna (I wrote about the conference on The Haves and Have Nots in my previous post), I went to Moscow, then to Oxford, to Oslo, back to Oxford, and finally to southern Portugal. Most of these trips involved attending

  I meant to write the final post of the series dealing with the crisis of the European Union. But the events are moving very rapidly, and the approach to current events which I take in my blog is to look into their historical roots. Additionally, it’s shaping as a sad post