There are places that no longer exist, yet refuse to disappear. They linger in photographs, in blurred memories, in stories whispered with a mix of disbelief and fascination. The Kowloon Walled City was one of those places—a geographical anomaly, a legal loophole, a vertical slum, and, paradoxically, a functioning human ecosystem. I never walked its corridors.

This frame was taken in Zhujiajiao, one of those ancient water towns that survive on the edge of Shanghai’s relentless expansion, like a memory that refuses to be erased. Stone bridges arc gently over narrow canals. The water moves slowly, carrying reflections rather than traffic. Here, time does not stop—but it hesitates. You can feel it in the worn steps polished by centuries of footsteps, in the quiet patience of the buildings leaning toward the water, in the muted rhythm of daily life unfolding far from the glass towers only an hour away.

Spoiler alert: today’s topic may catch you off guard — a crime movie, well outside my usual territory. But stay with me, and you’ll soon understand why it turns out to be far more interesting than it sounds. When The Rip, the gritty crime thriller starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, arrives on Netflix in a few days, on January 16, 2026, it won’t just be notable for its high-octane plot and star power.

There is a particular silence in Europe’s great reading rooms: the soft drag of felt on oak, the dry breath of paper, the little rituals of control—gloves, pencils, request slips, waiting. Libraries are built on trust disguised as procedure. And that is exactly what made the “Pushkin heist” so effective: it didn’t storm the front door. It walked in, sat down, and…

For decades, discussions about Taiwan’s future have been dominated by the specter of invasion: amphibious landings, missile strikes, and regional escalation. Yet Beijing’s most effective path to control Taiwan may not run through the Taiwan Strait at all. It may instead unfold quietly, incrementally, and legally—through political influence, economic leverage, and psychological normalization.

At its mechanical heart, the bicycle remains astonishingly efficient. In terms of energy conversion, it outperforms almost every other form of transport ever devised. A human on a bicycle can travel farther per unit of energy than any animal or machine of comparable scale. This is not marketing language; it is physics. Rolling resistance is low. Friction losses are minimal. Power transfer is direct and visible. When something breaks, you can usually see why.

As global energy markets tighten, as China and Russia deepen their presence in Latin America, and as Europe quietly looks elsewhere for supply security, Venezuela becomes once again relevant. Not as a pariah, but as a prize. The strike, in this sense, is less about Caracas and more about Beijing and Moscow — a reminder that the Western Hemisphere is still considered a zone of influence, not an open market.

If you want to understand what’s happening in Saudi Arabia now, don’t start from the renderings. Start from the governance: The Kingdom is deciding what creates real economic gravity—jobs, skills, housing, logistics, repeatable tourism demand—and what remains an expensive monument to ambition. For years, Saudi Arabia sold the world an idea: that the future could be built fast, top-down, with enough capital and willpower. If the future now arrives slower, in smaller segments, under stricter cost control, the Kingdom will have to replace spectacle with proof—less “look at this”, more “this works”.

Eating in Asia teaches you that respect can be silent, and that trust — in the menu, in the cook, in the system — is often rewarded. You may not get exactly what you expected. But more often than not, you get exactly what you needed.

There are moments when repression does not arrive with tanks or gunfire, but with paperwork, court dates, and the slow suffocation of words. Hong Kong is living one of those moments. And at its center stands Jimmy Lai — a frail, stubborn figure whose imprisonment tells the story of a city losing its voice. Jimmy Lai is not a revolutionary…

Some public commentary framed the US operation in Northern Nigeria as a defence of Christians against religious persecution. Nigerian officials were quick to reject that framing—and rightly so. ISIS-linked violence in Nigeria does not follow a single religious line. Christians are targeted. Muslims are targeted. Mosques and churches alike have been attacked. Civilians die not because of what they believe, but because they are reachable, undefended, and trapped inside contested spaces. Reducing this violence to a narrative of Christians versus Muslims risks misunderstanding the conflict and, worse, reinforcing the very sectarian divisions extremist groups exploit. ISIS does not seek theological purity alone; it seeks control through fear. Religion is a language it uses, not a boundary it respects.

Thailand’s latest escalation with Cambodia has been framed, from Bangkok, as something more precise than a border war: a campaign against the scam industry — the casinos, the sealed compounds, the “special economic zones” that are not quite economies and not quite legal, where fraud is industrialised and human beings are treated like replaceable cables in a server rack. Thailand says it is not attacking Cambodia as a nation so much as striking a…

There are policy decisions that arrive quietly, almost unnoticed, yet speak volumes about a country’s state of mind. China’s recent move to remove VAT exemption on contraceptives is one of them. On paper, it looks like a technical adjustment — a fiscal tweak meant to make products less affordable. In reality, it is a small window into a much larger unease…

Mau’s note: This article is based on reporting and investigations conducted by international journalists, human rights organizations and United Nations bodies over more than a decade. Key findings draw from the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which concluded in 2018 that Myanmar’s military campaign against the Rohingya showed genocidal intent and was preceded by widespread hate speech and incitement.

This photograph was taken in Abu Dhabi in 2015, in a moment when the city briefly surrendered to the desert. I was driving out of my garage when the sandstorm fully closed in. The sky turned opaque, the horizon dissolved, and the familiar geometry of roads and signs lost their authority. Everything was reduced to a single tone of yellow, dense and absolute.

I walked toward the Zayed National Museum with my Leica M11 Monochrom in hand, instinctively switching my eyes to black and white even before raising the camera. Some buildings ask for color; others demand contrast, shadow, geometry. This one belongs to the second category. On Saadiyat Island, under the pale Abu Dhabi sky, the museum does not shout. It…

I reached Japing on a slow morning, when the air was still moist and the sound of the storm still filled the valleys. The car had left the main road some time before, diving into narrow lanes bordered by palms and shrines covered in moss. In the heart of Bali, away from the cafés of Canggu and the tourist trails of Ubud, Japing unfolds like a living painting — a vast…

There is a moment, in every night market, when the chaos fades and all you see is a single human gesture. Here, under the neon haze of Shilin, a young vendor leans over his grill with the concentration of a craftsman. In his hands, not the tools of a chef but the instruments of a sculptor: tongs in one hand, a blowtorch in the other.

There’s something oddly poetic in the idea that the world’s most successful company makes a product we rarely notice. YKK — three letters stamped on billions of zippers — is one of those quiet presences that connect our daily lives more than we imagine. Jackets, jeans, backpacks, camera bags, tents: they all close with the small, perfect click of a YKK zip.

Every city has a place that tourists never quite find—a corner where the pulse of daily life beats quietly, untouched by the routines of souvenir hunters and package tours. In Taipei, this place hides beneath the elevated JHengguo Road, where two parallel markets wake up every weekend with the same calm precision as a well-kept ritual: the Jianguo…

I have walked through many markets in Asia, from the narrow lanes of Hanoi to the endless food corridors of Bangkok. Yet Taipei’s night markets have a rhythm that feels different, more intimate. They’re not just places where you go to eat; they’re windows into how the city breathes after dark. The neon lights flicker awake, scooters weave through impossible gaps, and suddenly a quiet neighbourhood becomes a theatre of…

Across Asia, temples are never just buildings. They are breaths of the past rising into the present, places where incense curls like memory, and where belief is expressed not through doctrine but through movement: slow, deliberate, deeply human. When I walk into a temple, whether in Taipei, Bangkok, Hanoi or Kyoto, I feel the same quiet pull: the sense that faith here is not…

Taipei never speaks in long sentences. It whispers in aromas, in the swirl of steam rising from a pot on a sidewalk, in the clatter of chopsticks echoing between narrow alleys. Every corner I turn, I’m reminded that this is a city where food is not a separate chapter , it is the narrative. You taste Taipei before you understand it, and often the understanding (if any) comes later, while walking with my…

Taiwan is a place where history feels layered like sediment: each epoch pressed over the previous one, never fully erasing what came before. Today’s island—democratic, technologically advanced, self-assured—rests on centuries of migrations, occupations, and reinventions. It is a story shaped as much by geography as by politics: a mountainous fortress on the western rim of the Pacific, close enough to invite conquest, far enough to nurture autonomy.

The “Milk Tea Alliance” began, as many modern political phenomena do, with a meme. In early 2020 a quarrel between Chinese nationalists and Thai internet users over a pop idol metastasised into a transnational online protest movement. It quickly drew in activists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and later Myanmar—societies that share little in language or political system, but much in experience: pressure from authoritarianism, frustration with entrenched elites, and a belief that democracy in Asia can be defended only through solidarity across borders.