For most of my life my curiosity pointed outward. I wanted to understand how things worked — physics, the universe, computers, the machinery underneath everything. I read about black holes and processors and the strange rules of very small particles, and it was thrilling, and it was somehow never …

I fell in love with a breed of dog because of a film, which is an embarrassing sentence to write, and I am going to write it down anyway.

The film was Hachi, the one with Richard Gere, and it is the true-ish story of an Akita in Japan named Hachiko. The shape of it is simple and quietly devastating. …

I did not expect to be moved by a fighter jet. I am not, by temperament, a military-hardware person. But I keep coming back, with a slightly sheepish pride, to the JF-17 Thunder — the lightweight fighter that Pakistan builds, and that has spent two decades quietly being better than it had any …