When writers are in the position to write a sequel, they’re often faced with a dilemma. How do you continue a story that was successful enough to warrant a sequel? To give the story a new narrative engine, you probably have to change a few things. In a genre story, you might need to create a new villain and mystery surrounding them for your hero to confront (the format of every successive James Bond film). But at the same time, you’re also mandated with meeting the expectations of retaining the elements that made a story “successful.” You have to reproduce the feeling, themes, and elements of the first story, while delivering a story that is new enough to surprise and satisfy.

This is an almost impossible task. Season 2 of The Wire (2003) famously shifted the focus of the plot from the Baltimore task force stinging the Barksdale drug-dealing organization to a mystery about human trafficking on the Baltimore docks, sidelining many of the series’ established characters for an entire season. This season was polarizing—on the one hand, it demonstrated narrative courage and inventiveness for trying to reinvent the show so broadly while retaining its investigative DNA. On the other, it had drifted far from what the show was sold as—a flailing police force tries a last-ditch task force as a salve on the war on drugs.

In hindsight, The Wire’s second season may go down as one of the most successful, critically speaking, attempts at a sequel. Because then we have shows that try to have it both ways—try to reinvent the show but slavishly reproduce the dynamics of the original series. And here we have to discuss the second season of The Night Manager.

John Le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager is one of his last truly great novels, in which he managed to shift his espionage fiction into the disorienting world that emerged after the Cold War. The titular hotel employee, Jonathan Pine, is radicalized after he helps a whistleblower fax some sensitive documents at his hotel, leading to the woman’s murder. At fault is a nefarious arms dealer named Richard Roper.

MI6 operative Leonard Burr persuades Pine to join the agency and go undercover to expose Roper, leading to a quest in which Pine infiltrates Roper’s inner circle, falls for Roper’s mistress, and becomes something of a surrogate son to Roper himself. But Roper will not be defeated so easily, as it turns out he’s working for a rival faction of MI6 that Burr must confront.

The original Prime series that adapted the novel (2016) casted Tom Hiddleston as Pine, Hugh Laurie as Roper, and Olivia Colman as a gender-flipped Angela Burr, and delivered a unenviable product—it was a faithful adaptation that also updated the setting to be more current (swapping Curaçao/Colombia for Turkey/Syria) and improved upon the original novel’s convoluted, inconclusive ending, so much so that even Le Carré praised the adaptation.

But after that, with The Night Manager a hit for Prime, and with the original source material exhausted, came the inevitable dilemma: if this were to continue, how would you go about it? Start anew, or reboot the old? (Spoilers below).

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Five years ago, when I lived in the old city of Nicosia, Cyprus, I would park my Honda Jazz in a dirt parking lot atop one of the Venetian battlements. A lot of people parked there — truck drivers, tourists, visitors, and there were no restrictions on leaving your car overnight. After all, in this country, people parked on the sidewalk, so I was actually doing the city a service.

One day, as I walked from my apartment to my car, headed out to buy groceries at the supermarket, I was approached by a Greek Cypriot woman wearing Apple headphones, the old-fashioned wired kind. She introduced herself as a casting agent, and she insisted that I must appear in a commercial she was producing, suggesting I film an audition tape in a nearby office building.

What followed was my brief encounter with the strange contours of a peripheral film industry.

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I originally wrote this story in 2018 for Medium. Eight years later, it’s still evergreen — and given the Winter Olympics, it’s high time to bring it back — on the Usonian platform.

The year was 1924. The place was Chamonix, a French Alpine town just below the snowy slopes of Mont Blanc. There, a global sporting tradition began—albeit modestly. At the time, the event was called La Semaine Internationale des Sports d’Hiver — International Winter Sports Week. The following year, the International Olympic Committee retroactively christened Chamonix 1924 as the first modern Winter Games.

Nearly a century later, the Winter Olympics’ outsize influence is readily apparent. For 16 days every four years, winter sports — many of which attract only niche audiences during the other three years and 349 days — capture the attention of the world. These include the glamorized sports of downhill skiing, figure skating, and ice hockey — alongside the decidedly less–romanticized events of bobsled, biathlon, and curling.

Of course, today’s wall–to–wall NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics would probably be unfathomable to the small audience of 10,000 spectators in Chamonix. It begs the question—just how did these ice–themed Olympics come to be?

As it turns out, part of the answer lies in the story of a fierce competition between rival international sports championships—the Olympics and the little–remembered Nordic Games. In this fight, you could say that the Olympics took home the gold — and the Nordic Games didn’t even medal.

And to understand that conflict—we’ll have to go all the way back to Ancient Greece.

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The following is a feature story I wrote in 2016 for a college journalism seminar about the 2001 dismantlement of the Princeton Guyot Hall museum. Now that it’s been ten years, a few of the subjects have passed on (Henry Horn and Jerry Ostriker among them); meanwhile, the famous Antrodemus skeleton (above image) has been relocated to the new earth sciences complex in 2025, as the historic Guyot Hall has begun its conversion from an earth science building to one devoted to computer science.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY—In late May, Princeton is often hot and humid. In 2000, it was strangely pleasant, with temperatures barely reaching 75 degrees, weather somewhat unusual for Reunions, a three-day long celebration filled with startling displays of inebriation. Apocryphally, it’s known as one of the largest beer orders in the world. But for a few geoscience department alumni, it was a crystallizing moment of a crisis. Following the departmental reception, a half-dozen alumni sat down and wrote letters to the then-University President, Harold Shapiro.

“People were very distrustful,” Geoff Feiss said, class of 1965, and a former provost of the College of William and Mary. “There was this feeling, I think Princeton was being a little too elitist and not too concerned with school-kids.” In March 2000, the University presented architectural plans to a Geoscience faculty meeting that announced the Guyot Hall Museum would soon close its doors for good. Over the summer the exhibits would be boxed up to make way for office space for the then-new Princeton Environmental Institute, a decision that aimed to radically changed the character of Guyot Hall, designed to be a museum at its construction in 1909.

“It was kind of a rebellious feeling, taking a stand on this,” Nancy West said, Feiss’ wife, and a geosciences major from the class of 1979 who took part in the letter-writing campaign. “It was a welcome break. You don’t go to Reunions hoping to accomplish something.” West contrasted the action to writing to a congressperson. “Senators don’t pull heartstrings, but Princeton does.” Over the summer of 2000, the conflict between museum supporters and the University erupted into a controversy that divided the community and attained national media attention. At stake was an illustrious legacy in natural science and a treasured local resource. Facing extinction, only a few relics survived.

The last of its kind

Though only a few artifacts survived the museum battle intact, you can find them in Guyot Hall, if you know where to look. Visit Guyot Hall today, and you might notice the shaved-off boulder that rests outside the entrance, a relic that helped prove the existence of the last Ice Age. After opening a great wooden door, you ascend a green stone staircase, its steps worn down with a century of foot traffic. The building’s main floor is a vaulted gallery. A mezzanine wraps around the building’s interior, and offices peek behind the elevated walkways, giving an anachronistic sense of a Victorian airplane hangar. Along the walls of the Geosciences wing, gems and minerals haunt a few display cases. Two overshadowing figures of Princeton geology eye the scene: mounted portraits of Arnold Guyot, the 19th century Swiss-American geologist, and Henry Hess, the founder of plate tectonics.

Walk past a great glass globe, into the office space of the Princeton Environmental Institute and further, to the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology, and you see another vision of the past: a dinosaur. The mounted Allosaurus skeleton lurks in the center of the room. (For Princeton geologists, it was Antrodemus, but Yale’s name was the one that caught on—fitting, given that Allosaurus in Greek means “the other lizard”). The extinct carnivore resembles a smaller version of its more famous descendant, the Tyrannosaurus. The creature began the transformation to stone when it died 150 million years ago in what is now the Western United States. It was unearthed in 1941 and installed twenty years later. There it has stayed, while itsneighbors have come and gone.

Today, few undergraduates know that Princeton University was the second institution to display mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world. They also might not realize that Princeton had been home to a natural science museum for about 125 years, and they might be more shocked to learn that this museum existed as recently as 2000.

This history is writ in the little objects scattered around Guyot Hall—the minerals, the boulder, the portraits, the dinosaur. The writer John McPhee, who has an office in Guyot, once called the Allosaurus yet another name: a ‘tokensaurus.’ For perhaps more than once in its existence, that dinosaur has been the last of its kind.

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Earlier this fall, I traveled to the summit of Mount Wilson, California, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountain Range that overlooks Los Angeles. The mountain is significant because it is home to the Mount Wilson Observatory, one of the most historically important astronomical stations in the world.

I went there because I was researching a piece on Henry Norris Russell, an influential astronomer of the late 19th and 20th century who consulted on projects at Mount Wilson. That piece—despite my overkill efforts at reporting (reading dusty tomes of astronomy, back issues of Scientific American, traveling to Mount Wilson)—attracted significant ire from the scientific community, mostly due to the fact that my source base minimized the role of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in determining the sun’s composition as primarily made of hydrogen. In fact, like many scientific breakthroughs, the question of the sun’s composition was a more complicated story of discovery, and for many decades Russell was solely credited with this breakthrough, failing to cite the pioneering work of Payne-Gaposchkin. The article’s comments clarify that story and scientific lineage; I appreciate that my readers took the time to lay out what I missed.

While humbling, I recognize that writing about science can often be a difficult balance—either you simplify the narrative to make it accessible—or you painstakingly try to please the scientists, and thereby lose the lay reader.

Or—as I learned in an unusually long afternoon session atop Mount Wilson—the storyteller can bore you to tears. And that leads me to my baffling experience with a tour-guide we’ll call “Telescope Jack.”

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NORTH BEND, WASHINGTON— The dense pines sparkled in the summer sun. We weren’t more than an hour from metropolitan Seattle, but North Bend and its sister town of Snoqualmie felt like places apart.

It was probably these qualities that led Twin Peaks co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost to situate most of their landmark television series here. A panoramic picture of a small town riven apart by the death of Homecoming queen Laura Palmer, to simply call Twin Peaks a “murder mystery” does a disservice to its unique blend of melodrama, offbeat humor, surreal images, and horror. In its scale of ambition, it laid the groundwork for the prestige TV era—long narrative arcs, huge casts, varied geography—an ambition that doomed its initial run, but made its eventual patchwork of stories even more compelling: a network TV series, a prequel film, and a Showtime revival, all richer as viewing experiences in the streaming age.

For me, Twin Peaks encapsulated why I got into writing in the first place. With its sharp turns between wry humor and sublime horror, it situated melodramatic story steeped in mystery, all suffused with a sheen of neo-noir and Lynchian Americana. It’s hard for me to get invested in story without intrigue, without hope and dread, but Twin Peaks has all of these elements—storytelling pieces I’ve tried to incorporate in my own narrative writing, fiction or otherwise.

So when a friend of mine invited me to join his group running a half-marathon in the North Bend area, I jumped at the chance to see the filming locations for myself.

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Last month, I paid a visit to Taos, New Mexico, where I started my writing career as a cub reporter for The Taos News in 2017. The paper invited me to write a reflection about the gangbuster changes to Taos since I lived there (i.e., it’s super bougie now), which you can read here.

During my visit to the Land of Enchantment, I also visited the modern community of Los Alamos, the historic site of the “Project Y” division of the Manhattan Project—still home to Los Alamos National Laboratory—and featuring several filming locations used in the 2023 film Oppenheimer.

If J. Robert Oppenheimer knew that the Manhattan Project would result in transforming his beloved Los Alamos into a creepy strip mall, maybe he would’ve thought twice about building the bomb?

Immediately upon entering modern Los Alamos, you are struck with the absolute, incontrovertible realization that a town built exclusively by military people, scientists, and engineers, would have no character whatsoever.

Modern Los Alamos is defined by pristine asphalt streets lined with banks and other corporate services precariously perched on the mesa more than 40 minutes away from Santa Fe. Ghostly strip malls with cafés and seemingly vacant brewpubs, as well as a company called, um, SpaceNukes, which is ostensibly developing nuclear-powered rocket ships to colonize Mars. (Whatever, good luck with that. I guess.)

On occasion you’ll run into a building dating back to the Manhattan Project days, and you’ll be amazed by the character of the log cabin-architecture from when this was the Los Alamos Ranch School, or the intriguing exteriors of Oppenheimer’s own house during the project, used for interiors during the movie. (Most of the Oscar-winning film was shot on a set built in the relatively-nearby Abiquiu, more famous for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, an area which still has a rural character.)

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The following is an adaptation of my remarks during the panel “A Tribute for David Lynch” hosted by The Brooklyn Rail on April 17, 2025.

Like a strobe light throbbing in a red-curtained room, film and TV was forever altered and energized by David Lynch. We’re living in a world where it’s taken for granted that classic visions of Americana can coexist with the surreal, where nightmarish dream logic can be punctuated by the offbeat humor of a non-sequitur, where anxiety and dread can lurk behind the dumpster of a diner that serves a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

There’s a recent piece by Abe Beame in the Los Angeles Review of Books that tries to identify what it means to be Lynchian, and it’s a really hard thing to pin down exactly. David Foster Wallace wrote that a “Rotary luncheon where everybody’s got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat…. and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.” Dennis Lim, in his biography of Lynch, wrote that if you visit any bus station at night, you’ll probably find eccentric people who have seemingly walked off the set of a Lynch movie.

Lynch’s lens for perceiving the world can be many things, but that lens—strange, funny, scary—has influenced a lot of other filmmakers. We can see it in Rian Johnson’s neo-noir film Brick, with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks aesthetics. We can see it in movies like Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, which has a lot going on, but the L.A. part of that three-timeline film feels really indebted to Lost Highway. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies also can’t exist without David Lynch’s attempt, and even Villeneuve has this shot of the dead Baron’s ear covered by beetles in the final minutes of Dune: Part Two that sort of tips his cap to Lynch. And you also can’t take in the Monstro Elisasue from The Substance without thinking about The Elephant Man.

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There are museums, and there are museums. Some of them chronicle natural history or showcase the world’s best art acquired from other places (often under shady colonial circumstances), others indulge in nationalist or propagandist narratives.

But my favorite museums are the ones that got it wrong yet still paradoxically exist as a shining example. Cutting edge for their time, these museums missed the mark, and they represent that yes, science changes over time and (hopefully) for the better.

One such museum is Turin’s Museo della Frutta. Yes, that’s Italian for “the Museum of Fruit.” The Museum of Fruit is a showcase to the artworks of Francesco Garnier Valletti, a Renaissance man from the 19th century who crafted thousands of replicas of, well, fruit.

And these aren’t your garden variety plastic apple that you find in the Ikea showroom. These are replicas of a variety of fruit species at every stage in their lifespan. From beautiful fruit at their apex to their rotten, post-ripe afterlife.

The question is, well, why? The answer is, funnily enough, intimately tied to the pursuit of knowledge. It’s also the reason behind two of the Fruit Museum’s neighboring museums, which are—by comparison—absolutely terrifying.

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On March 27, 2025, DTLA was buzzing. Outside Crypto.com Arena (wretch!), the Bob Avakian Communist Cult was handing out leaflets, and thousands of professional bookworms (cue purple sweaters, blue hair, Doc Martens) marched into the LA Convention Center, where they got into a registration line that rivaled the chaos of the TSA checkpoint at Denver International Airport.

The attraction was the AWP25 conference (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the massive gathering of MFA programs, indie presses, and other literati which attracts more than 12,000 attendees annually. If Sundance is the premier American film festival, AWP is of the same magnitude for poetry and indie literary fiction.

The last AWP I had attended was AWP20 in San Antonio, just a few days before the COVID lockdown put the world on hold for a couple of years. It was precisely that weekend that many would-be conference-goers had cold feet and pulled out from showing up, and the majority of panels and bookfair booths were cancelled. In Texas, we watched the news with baited breath—a man with COVID who had just returned from a cruise ship Petri dish had visited a local indoor mall before falling ill. Patient Texas-Zero. In lieu of the abandoned conference, I found myself aimlessly pacing the San Antonio Riverwalk, one of our nation’s finest tourist traps, complete with its own Rainforest Café and Margaritaville.

Though AWP25 was bustling by comparison, dark clouds had returned to the horizon, as the literary and arts community finds itself in the Trump Administration’s crosshairs.

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In February, I published a feature about documentary filmmaker Cecilia Peck in Princeton Alumni Weekly. Peck, the daughter of Hollywood icon Gregory Peck, specializes in docuseries about modern cults. Both Seduced, her Starz docuseries about the NXIVM cult, and Escaping Twin Flames, her Netflix series about the Twin Flames Universe cult, have been lauded for the way that they not only explore how people get sucked into these high control groups, but how they can recover and get out of them.

That attention to recovery is often what is missing in the true crime genre, which tends to rely on the exploitation of sordid details.

In the research for that article, I talked to a bunch of cult experts. They all had different definitions of what a cult is. I didn’t end up using all that research in the original article, but I thought it would be fun to share it with you here.

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One afternoon in 1911, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret sat aimlessly aboard a Constantinople-based steamer bound for Piraeus, Greece. In his boredom, Jeanneret climbed the ropes of the ship and looked out onto the sea. As evening approached, the ship’s chef brought up dishes of fried octopus from Mycenae. At night, Jeanneret slept on the deck, under the stars, wrapped within the folds of a Romanian rug he had purchased at a monastery in Mount Athos. “What sweeter litany can there be than that of the bow waves slapping against a hull vibrating with the ship’s engines,” Jeanneret wrote in his journal, expressing more interest in the ship than the Aegean. The comment was fitting, considering the direction his life would take. Still, he was haunted “by a dream, a yearning, a madness.”

A few days before, at the port of Thessaloniki, 800 bulls were loaded onboard and shoved into stockades. As Jeanneret described in his diary:

The joints of the crane grated; the powerful hook dropped rapidly down to their heads. Quick, a running noose around the horns, brief command, the hook is taken up again carrying away that enormous mass of meat hung by its horns… the bull arrived at the end of the hold and fell on its back, rolling its bewildered eyes. It hardly had time to recover when, seized by the ring in its muzzle, it was firmly fastened.

Jeanneret recorded these events dispassionately. He was unconcerned for the plight of the bulls. In later years, he would adopt an attitude in favor of machines, of control. He would design houses as machines for living. Maybe his “machines” were not so cruel as the method by which the bulls were treated, but his concept had a similar result in mind.

A tall, bony man, Jeanneret was an unlikely candidate to become the first modern celebrity architect. The 24-year-old Swiss was the son of a clockmaker, though the old man was not expert in the inner workings of clocks. Rather, the elder Jeanneret decorated their surfaces. It was a profession which had more in common with Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s destiny than he probably would have liked to admit.

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This post is adapted from an extended research paper I wrote as a history major at Princeton University. Part I came out in July. A free preview is available to all subscribers. If you want to read more, please consider a paid subscription.

Mysterious deaths aboard Le Grand Sainte Antoine

Four months before the Grand Saint Antoine arrived at Marseilles on May 25, 1720, it had departed Seyde (contemporary Sidon) on January 30th. Later, it was discovered that plague broke out in Seyde not long after the ship’s departure. With the infection in Seyde, it was possible the ship picked up merchandise infested with infected rats, fleas and/or lice. But the plot thickened, because at a stop in Tripoli on April 3rd, the ship picked up Turkish passengers with clean bills of health, one of whom fell ill and died on the night of April 5th. During efforts to dispose the body, two sailors touched the corpse. The pair fell ill and died on April 27 and 28. After that, two more sailors, as well as the ship’s physician, fell ill and died suddenly by May 4th and May 6th.

Alarmed, Captain Chataud isolated himself, and set sail for the Italian port city of Livorno. Refused entry at the port of Livorno on May 17th, three more sailors fell ill and died suddenly after they were dropped off at the Livorno lazaretto, subsequently diagnosed with “malignant and pestilential fever,” which, for the record, is not strictly a diagnosis of plague. A week later, the ship arrived in Marseille.

Did the plague come from Seyde, or from the Turkish passenger? Nine weeks had passed before the Turkish passenger boarded the vessel. This made it unlikely that an ill member of the crew could have infected the Turkish passenger, considering that no crewmembers were sick before he boarded. Being bitten by a bubonic plague-infected flea from the possibly infested ship’s cargo would not have killed him within three days. Absent of these options, he could have died of just about anything.

Scott and Duncan believe the Turkish passenger was the vector of the plague, considering that the crew did not become ill on the long voyage from Syria. But plague was confirmed in Syria after they departed, and nothing suggests Tripoli was infected at the time they left. Moreover, the sailors who touched the Turkish passenger’s corpse died 22 days after the fact. Physical contact with infectious bodily fluids is consistent with hemorrhagic fevers, but also septicemic plague, or pneumonic plague if droplets of Y. Pestis are inhaled, but all of these possibilities exceed the time period that would be consistent with contracting one of these pathogens and death. If someone caught a viral hemorrhagic fever, they would know relatively quickly, because they would probably die soon after; the same was true of pneumonic plague. Bubonic plague could take more time to declare itself; incubation ranged from one to eight days.

Under the condition that there was infested merchandise, either from the Turkish passenger or Syria, then a parasite living in the merchandise or on rodents near the merchandise could have infected the pair of sailors. It was less obvious a solution than the infection and death of two people because of contact with inflected body fluids, but just as feasible when one considered the evidence in the following sections.

Scarcely a week had passed before two more sailors and the ship’s doctor died, and it was practically certain that the ship’s doctor came into close contact with the sick sailors, at which point the doctor could have been infected by one of the ill, or alternately, a parasite living on the victim’s body. The next set of deaths was ten days after that, at which point anyone could have been infected at any time. This timeline between illnesses would be consistent with bubonic plague for the doctor’s case, since he would have treated the first set of sailors and then became ill ten days later. There was not enough evidence to say for certain if infected merchandise was the cause at this stage of the chronology—we leave that for geospatial analysis of the spread in town, which makes the case much more clear.

What we do know from this point is that the plague was spread from either Seyde, where plague was reported, or less likely, the Turkish passenger and his merchandise from Tripoli; the plague was possibly spread by close contact with the victims; and that on approximately ten day intervals after the first crewmen died, a new set of crewmen were killed. The events that followed during the quarantine complicated this narrative.

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This post is adapted from an extended research paper I wrote as a history major at Princeton University. Part 2 comes out in August. A free preview is available to all subscribers. If you want to read more, please consider a paid subscription.

On May 25^th, 1720, a merchant ship named Le Grand Saint Antoine arrived from the Levant and ignited one of the last major outbreaks of plague in Western Europe. In the (translated) words of M. Bertrand, a physician who survived the event:

[The plague] soon broke out with irresistible fury, spreading over the whole city, and sweeping down all before it. Rich and poor, male and female, young and old, alike became its victims, and the whole town was filled with mourning and tears.

The ensuing epidemic killed 39,334 of the city’s preexisting population of 90,000, spread to neighboring cities of Provence, and at its height, killed 1,000 people a day in Marseille. All told, 43.7% of the city’s population was wiped out in a matter of months.

In the early 18th century, Marseille appeared to be quite capable of preventing a plague outbreak. The city was experienced with plague, having been attacked by nineteen major plague epidemics over the course of its history. To mitigate this threat, Marseille was equipped with a sophisticated public health system of quarantines, lazarettos and hospitals. In many ways, however, this seeming preparedness made the city more of a target, a powder keg ready to explode. Over 1500 ships passed through Marseille’s port a year, the largest in Southern France. In 1709, the French crown designated the city the quarantine port for all of France, so that all ships traveling from the Levant had to be quarantined in Marseille first. The city prospered, but all this trade would come at a cost.

But what caused the plague of Marseille? And how did it spread? In our modern world, still limping from the COVID-19 pandemic, we can learn a lot by unpacking the pandemics of the world’s past.

The plague cycle and Yersinia Pestis

We can begin to understand the magnitude of the catastrophe by placing it within its context: throughout European history, plagues have occurred every few hundred years in successive waves. The plague of Marseille is considered to be one of the final waves of the Black Death, the 1348 outbreak that killed more than one third of the European population—both outbreaks are labeled under the umbrella of the “second pandemic.” The “first pandemic,” the Plague of Justinian in 541 CE, preceded this second pandemic, which in turn was succeeded by the “third pandemic,” the 1894 outbreak that mostly affected China and India. The third pandemic, while not having the same devastating effect as previous plague outbreaks, persists today: plague is considered to be a reemerging infectious disease.

The general consensus regarding the three pandemics is that they were all caused by the same pathogen: Yersinia Pestis, a bacterium that can be spread by parasites such as fleas, which are in turn carried on the backs of rodents, such as rats. While investigating the 1894 outbreak in China, Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburō discovered Pasteurella Pestis, renamed in 1954 to honor Yersin. Significantly, the pair of scientists identified the bacillus as the cause of all historical plagues. Since then, the majority of historians have conflated Y. Pestis and the disease it causes, bubonic plague, with the historical concept of plague in general, despite the fact that the “plague” was a term historically used to characterize a set of symptoms, rather than the identity of the pathogen itself. (Medieval historians did not have the benefits of modern germ theory.) Moreover, scholars have begun to present evidence that challenges whether bubonic plague was always the culprit—or the cause at all—of various historical epidemics.

The Black Death and associated plague outbreaks are often problematic in the study of history, which typically hinges on human agency. By being a “Great Disaster,” plagues are often considered as “acts of God” in which humans are helpless. Since Yersin’s time, the rats have always been the villain, the instrument of God or nature’s will to punish human societies. Yet the Plague of 1720 presents a different story: there is only one reference to dead animals in the city in the record of this outbreak, and it never explicitly calls them rats. So we must look for another explanation.

What if merchandise infested with bubonic plague-infected parasites was the primary vector for disease, rather than rats, and humans actively moved the infested merchandise along, ensuring the plague’s devastation? Then the villain of this outbreak was not rats, but merchants misguided by greed, or just as likely, ignorance.

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“On February 24, 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples. As usual, a coastal pilot immediately left the port, sailed hard by the Château d’If, and boarded the ship between the Cap de Morgiou and the island of Riou.”1 So begins Alexandre Dumas’ epic novel The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most influential adventure stories of all time—a saga that launches from the cosmopolitan, enigmatic city of Marseille.

Marseille is the second city of France, but for most of its history it was not even part of the French nation. Founded by Greeks as Massallia in antiquity, but occupied by humans for far longer, during the Middle Ages Marseille was part of the independent kingdom of Provence.

As William Firebrace so eloquently describes in Marseille Mix, his incisive study of the city:

Marseille is a series of invented cities, living as stories and images, sometimes original, sometimes borrowed, strung together without too much concern for the joints and overlaps. There are any number of semi-fictional versions of Marseille, competing with one another and often contradictory—the comic seaside village whose inhabitants doze out in the sun; the haven of gangsters and whores with its carefully staged shoot-outs; the magnificent port, former gateway to the east, now mostly derelict; the multicultural city of immigrants and outcasts, colourful or threatening or both together; the new city of leisure, capital of the would-be land of Provence-California; the city of grainy music videos, with youths shooting up outside mournful housing blocks; the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens; the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean coast, with its hills and limestone coves. All these cities are found in the many books and films about Marseille, each one based on some actual aspect of the city, but also a projection, an overstatement or deliberate distortion, for somehow Marseille more than most cities lends itself to myths and exaggerations. With every characterisation the feel of Marseille turns and shifts, the city moves from dangerous to harmless, from healthy to sick, from light to dark. Each of these images creates a different city, a city that is never precisely sited, a city that is always elsewhere.2

A city that is many things, a city that is always elsewhere. And Marseille is always elsewhere from the vantage of its nearby islands. As we embark on The Usonian’s three-part visit to Marseille, we’ll begin with Marseille’s version of Alcatraz—the prison island of If.

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The oldest religious building in the world may well be a stack of eroded boulders on Gozo, a Maltese island that just comprises 26 square miles (the same size as Arlington County in Virginia).

Temples are among the oldest surviving buildings of ancient civilizations. Built to reflect devotion to higher powers (and an ancient despot’s devotion to those gods), these temples were built to last. And the Neolithic temples of Ġgantija (pronounced “gigatantiya”, like the Spanish “gigante”) predates Stonehenge, were built as early as 3600 B.C.E.

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“Don’t go to Malta,” a friend told me. “Maybe a weekend,” he revised. “But not, dear God, for a month.”

I was living in Cyprus, eager to visit another nearby corner of the world. Though I was intrigued by the bafflingly low prices of budget airline RyanAir, I was confused about my intent—to fly from one Mediterranean island to another just felt a little capricious.

But I had a friend who had friends in Malta, and I felt like that was reason enough to go. For a weekend, at least.

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You’ve seen this desert before. It’s so otherworldly that in film, it frequently stands in for other planets. It’s served as Arrakis in Dune (2021), various Star Wars desert worlds, and Mars in more movies than you can count. Its real name is Wadi Rum, the “City of the Pillars”—also known as the “Valley of the Moon.”

But the movie that inaugurated that cinematic tradition was the epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In the classic film, the moment when T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) watches a match burn down marks the transition between his time as a British intelligence officer in Egypt and his mission as liaison to the Arab Prince Faisal, one that will see Lawrence transform into the larger-than-life “Lawrence of Arabia,” the British archaeologist-turned-spy who fought alongside the Bedouin tribes in their war of independence against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In the film—as the match goes out—director David Lean masterfully jump-cuts to the stunning landscape of Wadi Rum, where towering chimneys of sandstone rock emerge from dunes of red-orange sand. It was here that the myth of Lawrence was born, a desert so striking it seemed the inevitable setting to generate a persona as historically controversial and challenging as that of Lawrence.

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PETRA, JORDAN—The American poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil has published a poem called “One-star reviews of the Great Wall of China,” a parody of online reviewers who just don’t buy into the grandeur of one of humanity’s greatest achievements. For Petra, the reverse might be true—it may be more spectacular than all those other monuments combined. In the words of a New York Times journalist’s wife— “[Petra] makes Machu Picchu feel like a pile of stones.”1

It’s true that some storied monuments underwhelm (the Alamo is an especially small monument for Texas) but others meet the hype. And though I’ve never been to the Inca ruin, so I hesitate to dismiss it, it’s true that Petra’s grandeur exceeds all expectations.

You might know Petra from the movies, particularly Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Harrison Ford and Sean Connery briefly ride through a narrow canyon into a clearing and face an incredible monument—in the film, it’s the portal to an ancient temple, the sacred hiding place of the Holy Grail. What the film doesn’t indicate is that the canyon is real, and it’s a mile long. It also doesn’t indicate that “The Treasury” (as the tomb they visit in the film is known) is but one of a massive complex of tombs cut into the red sandstone cliffs amidst the ruins of a Roman-era city, featuring an amphitheater and road.

It also doesn’t reflect the somewhat chaotic experience of visiting the site itself. Though the grand entrance to the Petra Archaeological Park in the vertiginous cliffside town of Wadi Musa is grand and modern—affecting an atmosphere of Jurassic Park—once you enter the park, you might encounter Jordanian guides calling themselves “Wifi” offering to take you to the highest point (for a price), Bedouin tribespeople selling trinkets and the experience of drinking tea or taking photos with children, and abused camels and donkeys available to tourists for “rides.” All these activities don’t stop an upscale restaurant run by the British Crowne Plaza hotel chain from operating (as well as hawking Snickers and Twix bars), or Jordan’s tourist visa package that includes multi-day passes into the site.

All told, Petra is a magnificent display of contradictions. As recent research has revealed, perhaps it’s always been that way—the Dubai of the ancient world, a spectacular oasis in the desert, conspicuous consumption in a harsh environment the greatest symbol of wealth, power, and influence.

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AMMAN, JORDAN—The gateway to Jordan is through its capital, Amman, or rather, its sleek and spacious airport, with a modern terminal completed in 2013. The gleaming terminal, with its sleek anodized-steel Starbucks, might give you the false impression that you are in a Western country. You are not.

Take the freeway from that airport into the city and you might be in for a shock. A road with lanes, for a few miles at least, soon has no lanes to speak of, and then you’re driving a Hot Wheels car on a free stretch of track, hopeful that no one will bump into each other as each car weaves closer or further from the median. Take an exit and you’ll pass by the numerous gated government compounds on the way to the downtown. During the hot sun of the day, the streets are quiet, like an abandoned afternoon in a small Great Plains metro like Omaha or Des Moines—but at night, when the sun goes down—it’s total, absolute gridlock. Or, as the hotel desk attendant informed me—“At night, it’s a party.”

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