Wandering 🇭🇰🇲🇾🇺🇸

WATCH: Iranians cheer as missiles fly to Israel

Everyone in Pakistan, except Central/Northern Punjab and Karachi, is convinced there's a gazillion dollars' worth of minerals buried under their feet. Meanwhile, the places with no such grand delusions actually get things done and keep the whole country afloat. There's something dark and funny about it. The poorer a region gets, the more elaborate the fantasies become. You watch people in these areas weave grand stories about hidden wealth, resources that'll save them someday, Turn them into something akin to Gulf Kafeels, who'll spend evenings chilling and reading their 8000-year histories. Someone should study this properly that how desperation and delusion feed each other.

🇨🇳 Right now across China, cities are deliberately going quiet Here in Xiamen the rules are clear and city-wide: no car horns, no loud construction or renovation work and no unnecessary noise. It’s not subtle and it’s not just Xiamen. The Gaokao, China’s National College Entrance Examination, started today. Roughly 12.9 million students are sitting it over the next couple of days, with some provinces running through the 9th or 10th. Their scores will largely decide which university they attend and, for many, shape the direction their lives take. In a country this size and this competitive, that’s not an abstraction. What gets me the most living here isn’t the pressure, though it’s real and everyone feels it. It’s the collective seriousness. This isn’t a top-down crackdown. It’s not students being treated as cogs in a machine either. It’s a society deciding, at scale, that the next generation’s education is worth temporarily reorganising daily life around. Construction pauses, traffic patterns shift and the police are out, but not in the way Western headlines tend to imply. Here in Xiamen I’ve seen them gently reminding drivers and workers to keep the noise down. Polite, professional and focused on protecting students’ concentration rather than making a show of authority. The goal is simple: give these kids the best possible shot at performing when it counts. That attitude works for bigger things. China doesn’t lead the world in EVs, high-speed rail, renewables, advanced manufacturing and a growing share of frontier STEM fields by accident. The reason it’s leading is that it sees developing its people as a main national focus, not an optional extra or a political distraction. The Gaokao is one visible expression of that. A highly competitive, performance-driven process that funnels talent into the organisation on a vast scale. When a country of 1.4 billion people decides its children’s education is important enough to quiet entire cities for it, you start to understand the results you see in patents, infrastructure and technological development speed. Western coverage tends to reduce this to “exam hell” or “rote memorisation factories.” That framing misses the point. What you’re seeing here is the practical outcome of consistent, long-term investment in the next generation, defined by concrete actions that underscore the principle that those who prepare for the future will own it. The kids sitting these exams today will be the ones building, innovating and leading the next phase of what’s happening here. The country is making sure they get the quiet they need to do it.

my ideal cultural synthesis: religious: islamic architectural: levantine culinary: hindustani literary: persianate sartorial: kavkazofuturism (shervani counts)

As it turns out, the damage in Kuwait is absolutely apocalyptic. This is a consequence of a very small barrage too. It seems that the interceptor stockpile situation in the Middle East is catastrophic.

Kayfabe? "Kayfabe is the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their audience to pretend that staged wrestling events, characters, and storylines are genuinely real."

Karbala, Iraq, 1996 🇮🇶