Pico Iyer

Satyajit Ray’s ‘The Hero’

For Ray, The Hero was a chance to meditate on the nature of role-playing, to reflect on the costs of make-believe, and to address perhaps the dominant theme of his middle period, the place of conscience.

Nymphets in the New Japan

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Kurosawa’s Japan Revisited

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru may have looked a bit more broad and didactic than I remembered. But since I moved to Japan, the film somehow still touches on a world that grows deeper within me every autumn.

Empty Cities

When Hunter Thompson wrote, “For the loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth,” he hadn’t been to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital where even the sometime-winners are abruptly sent before the firing squads.

An Unknown America of the Mind

Proust & Buddhism

When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other than Marcel Proust.

Hyderabad in Five Colors

India most happily changes the lives of those who have no thought of changing India.

Japan: ‘Emotions Under the Surface’

Leonard Cohen’s Holy Dove

Cities of Sleep

The content of my dreams has long ceased to interest me; but their proportions, the way they rearrange the things I thought I cared about, the life I imagined I was leading, won’t go away.

‘Masters of Doing Nothing at All’

Somalia: Diving into the Wreck

The McLuhan Galaxy

Tibet’s Quiet Revolution

It’s been startling to witness mass demonstrations in countries across the Middle East for freedom from autocracy, while, in the Tibetan community, a die-hard champion of “people power” tries to dethrone himself and his people keep asking him to stay on. Again and again the Dalai Lama (who tends to be more radical and less romantic than most of his followers) has sought to find ways to give up power, and his community has sought to find ways to ensure he can’t.

On the Sacred Mountain

Going Mad for Greece

Secret Love in the Lost City

‘A Hell on Earth’

Royal Flush