At the small Museum of War and Genocide Victims in Mostar, one Google reviewer wrote: “It was ‘only’ a collection of items from the war.” The walls were lined with plastic vitrines containing personal items like a towel, backpacks, coats, and other plain everyday things. These objects belonged to…

I cursed as I plodded up a gravelly trail through the Accursed Mountains, the Albanian Alps, from Valbona to Theth. The Balkan mountain range was raw, jagged, and patched with glacial moraines. The trail began with a long mostly flat section through a bright white rocky river bed and then…

I stood at the top of a peak in the Accursed Mountains (the Albanian Alps!) a few days ago feeling awe and wonder mixed with sadness for the death of my brilliant, generous, and complicated pal Alberto Gaitan. I cried cathartic tears. And then I cried again a few hours…

What eating olive oil and prosciutto in Tuscany taught me about friendship and human connections — We are sitting on a Tuscan terrace with a glass of sparkling rosé as the sun sets beyond a grove of olive trees behind the villa where my friend Umberto lives with his wife Fulvia and daughter Corrina. Umberto doesn’t usually drink prosecco, probably because it’s from the north and…

The most important thing I learned about how to have conversations across the political divide — The usual sense of unease and slight dread settled into my gut as we descended through the clouds toward Columbia Regional Airport. We were about to land in Little Dixie, a region in Missouri populated by Southerners who’d migrated West from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee before the Civil War, bringing…

How do you build political power around racial identity? — I think about my identity a lot. Mostly in a “who am I and why am I here” existential sense. I think about identity in a political sense, too, because one way to build political power in a democracy is to band together with folks who share an identity. A…

Walt Whitman believed that the power of poetry and democracy are derived from their capacity to make a unified whole from diverse and sometimes contradictory parts. He said, “The United States are the greatest poem.” …

Finding Vietnamese food everywhere I go in the world

What does it take to live a flourishing life? — I recently received an apology from someone who’d said unkind things about me behind my back and who’d treated me with condescension and contempt for a period of time 15 years ago. I was an art world newbie who’d crashed the party. I didn’t have any traditional art training beyond…