Category: Travel
Muscat, Oman travel notes
Oman feels more relaxed than much of the Middle East or Gulf, and vistas in Muscat can include the sea, white alabaster buildings, mountains in the backdrop, and some older castles.
There are plenty of foreigners around, but unlike in much of the Gulf most of the people you see are natives not migrants. English is spoken widely, and is present on most of the signs and menus. Women wear headscarves, but they are not usually veiled. The vibes are friendly and everything feels extremely safe.
Muscat is not quite “the linear city,” but most activity is located on or near one main road which stretches east-west. There is no center of town, and you find yourself going back and forth on that road multiple times a day. The plus is that you see the water and the mountains often. Nonetheless there is a monotony to getting around, and much of the town does not feel walkable.
Frequently you will see a poster of the current Sultan, next to a photograph of the previous Sultan, who ruled for fifty years. Does this dual presentation enhance or limit the credibility of the current Sultan? Was it the intent of the current Sultan, or was he somehow locked into that presentation by the interest groups and supporters of the previous Sultan?
The National Museum is very good, and shows that Oman historically, along with Yemen, has held the role of a great civilization. In fact, Oman drove out the Portuguese and then ruled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1856. That explains why the island has so many Arabic doors and motifs.
Per capita income, PPP-adjusted, clocks in at about 45k, but distribution is uneven and the country does not feel that wealthy. I cannot find a single number for median income, but I suspect it would underrate actual living standards. Even deep into the countryside you will find high-quality homes and roads, indicating that public funds are spent with some efficiency, at least relative to some comparison countries.
Misfat al Abriyeen is a small village, largely vertical, where they still use water and irrigation systems from at least two thousand years ago.
Nizwa is a town of about 80,000, about two hours from Muscat, with a much older and more traditional souk.
When driving around Oman, the Peter Gabriel soundtrack “Passion,” from The Last Temptation of Christ, is effective.
For food, try Persian at Shandiz or grilled fish at Turkish House, or Yemeni or Afghan offerings. There are several restaurants with “Omani food,” but the problem is that they are authentic, not that they are insufficiently authentic. You should try some, much of it is not bad but it is also not the best food in town. At one place they flat outright refused to bring me the dried, salted shark dish. Nor did I wish to order camel meat, which is supposed to be gamey. The soups with meat and barley are good, but basically for Omani food you wish to keep returning to the grilled fish.
Overall, Oman is an underrated travel destination. It is exotic and beautiful and comfortable, all at the same time. The further reaches of the country are renowned for hiking and birdwatching, but perhaps two days in Oman and a one day trip to the countryside is the optimal dose here?
For U.S: and many other citizens, it is easy to enter the country without a visa.
Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, vs. Tysons Corner mall, northern Virginia
1. More women wear the full veil at Tysons, especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
2. There are more Christmas decorations at Mall of the Emirates.
3. You will find a “Borders bookstore” — replete with the original font — at the Emirates locale.
4. At the Emirates mall you hear much more Russian, and many of the core signs are in Russian too. I guess that is the biggest difference?
Markets in everything?
If you don’t yet have a REAL ID, you can continue to fly, but it’s going to cost you. Beginning Feb. 1, 2026, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will start collecting a $45 fee from travelers using non-compliant forms of identification at airport security checkpoints.
The agency previously proposed a fee of $18 to cover the administrative and IT costs of ID verification for those traveling without a REAL ID or passport but increased the total to $45 in an announcement released earlier this month.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
What has gone wrong with tourism to Las Vegas?
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off.
Here is the full story, which shows it is by no means an exclusively Canadian phenomenon. Overall, I am happy to see a shift away from gambling, drinking, and “shows for wealthy old people”?
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
What we’re grateful for
Here is the Free Press symposium, here is my contribution:
Tyler Cowen, columnist
I am grateful for how many parts of the world I can visit freely. I have been to roughly 105 countries and have not had serious problems getting to them, entering them, or leaving them. Nor have I contracted any serious illnesses abroad.
I do feel some recent growth in restrictions. For instance, I cannot go to Russia and be assured of my safety, nor would I feel comfortable visiting Ukraine at the current moment, given the ongoing Russian attacks. Nonetheless, so very much of the world is accessible to us, whenever we wish to be there.
This is an unparalleled opportunity, without precedent in the history of mankind.
My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual. Here is the episode summary:
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.
Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.
SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.
And;
COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?
SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?
What are they writing?
My first trip to Tokyo
To continue with the biographical segments:
My first trip to Tokyo was in 1992. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and my friend Dan Klein contacted me and said “Hey, I have a work trip to Tokyo, do you want to meet me there?” And so I was off, even though the flight was more of a drag than I had been expecting. It is a long way up the Pacific.
Narita airport I found baffling, and it was basically a two hour, multi-transfer trip to central Tokyo. Fortunately, a Japanese woman was able to help us make the connections. I am glad these days that the main flights come into Haneda.
(One Japan trip, right before pandemic, I decided to spend a whole day in Narita proper. Definitely recommended for its weirdness. Raw chicken was served in the restaurants, and it felt like a ghost town except for some of the derelicts in the streets. This experience showed me another side of Japan.)
We stayed in a business hotel in Ikebukuro, a densely populated but not especially glamorous part of Tokyo. It turned out that was a good way to master the subway system and also to get a good sense of how Tokyo was organized. I had to one-shot memorize the rather complicated footpath from the main subway station to the hotel, which had been chosen by my friend’s sponsors. As we first emerged from the subway station, we had, getting there the first time, to ask two Japanese high schoolers to help us find the way. They spoke only a few words of English, but we showed them the address in Japanese and they even carried our bags for us, grunting “Hai!” along the way, giving us a very Japanese experience.
In those days very little English was spoken in Tokyo, especially outside a few major areas such as Ginza. You were basically on your own.
I recall visiting the Sony Center, which at the time was considered the place to go to see new developments in “tech.” I marveled at the 3-D TV, and realized we had nothing like it. I felt like I was glimpsing the future, but little did I know the technology was not going anywhere. Nor for that matter was the company. Here is Noah, wanting the Japanese future back.
Most of all, Tokyo was an extreme marvel to me. I felt it was the single best and most interesting place I had visited. Everywhere I looked — even Ikebukuro — there was something interesting to take note of. The plastic displays of food in the windows (now on the way out, sadly) fascinated me. The diversity, order, and package wrapping sensibilities of the department stores were amazing. The underground cities in the subways had to be seen to be believed (just try emerging from Shinjuku station and finding the right exit). The level of dress and stylishness and sophistication was extreme, noting I would not say the same about Tokyo today. This was not long after the bubble had burst, but the city still had the feel of prosperity. Everything seemed young and dynamic.
I also found Tokyo affordable. The reports of the $2,000 melon were true, but the actual things you would buy were somewhat cheaper than in say New York City. It was easy to get an excellent meal for ten dollars, and without much effort. My hotel room was $50 a night. The subway was cheap, and basically you could walk around and look at things for free. The National Museum was amazing, one of the best in the world and its art treasures cannot, in other forms, readily be seen elsewhere.
Much as I like Japanese food, I learned during this trip that I cannot eat it many meals in a row. This was the journey where I realized Indian food (!) is my true comfort food. Tokyo of course has (and had) excellent Indian food, just as it has excellent food of virtually every sort. I learned a new kind of Chinese food as well.
The summer heat did not bother me. I also learned that Tokyo is one of the few cities that is better and more attractive at night.
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
I came away happy.
My side trip, by the way, was to the shrines and temples of Kamakura, no more than an hour away but representing another world entirely. Recommended to any of you who are in Tokyo with a day to spare.
Now since that time, I’ve never had another Tokyo trip quite like that one. These days, and for quite a while, the city feels pretty normal to me, rather than like visiting the moon. Fluent English is hard to come by, but most people can speak some English and respond to queries. You can translate and get around using GPS, AI, and so on. The city is much more globalized, and other places have borrowed from its virtues as well.
Looking back, I am very glad I visited Tokyo in 1992. The lesson is that you can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now.
Waymo
Waymo now does highways in the Bay area.
Expanding our service territory in the Bay Area and introducing freeways is built on real-world performance and millions of miles logged on freeways, skillfully handling highway dynamics with our employees and guests in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This experience, reinforced by comprehensive testing as well as extensive operational preparation, supports the delivery of a safe and reliable service.
The future is happening fast.
Notes on Maputo (Mozambique)
An excellent piece by Joseph Levine, do read the whole thing, here is one excerpt:
Yango is the local ride-hailing app and makes life really easy. It’s a Dubai-based company, split off from Russian Yandex in 2024. Today it’s available as a ride-hailing app in 30+ African countries. Yango rides are really cheap, cheaper than taxis in Freetown or Kanifing, and quality was much higher. A 15 minute ride from my house to my office cost $0.23 on a motorbike, $0.58 in a tuk-tuk, $1.05 in a car, and $1.20 in the equivalent of an Uber Black car. I usually ended up taking the cheaper car option, because you can’t easily sit next to or talk to the driver of a tuk-tuk.
Yango eliminates the ability of taxi drivers to price discriminate. When I walked out of the airport, the taxi drivers wanted ~$20 for the drive to my flat, and I talked them down to $10. On Yango, the drive is $3. My general model of digital marketplaces is that they enable price discrimination (e.g., Uber surge pricing), but in Mozambique it’s the opposite.
Drivers are often professionals working a full-time job, or graduate students. I met a dentist, an engineer working at the new Total plant, several accountants. They also made up the majority of the Muslim Mozambicans whom I met. Most Muslims in Maputo are first- or second-generation immigrants from the northern provinces. One driver, Ismael, grew up on Mozambique Island, about 1,000km north of Maputo; it has a population of 10,000, but most of the young people move to Maputo. He came down to study engineering and now works at a terminal exporting natural gas.
Because I wasn’t on the local mobile money system, I paid for each Yango ride in cash. The car drivers rarely had change (tuk-tuk drivers always did). Alongside rating the driver in the Yango app out of 5 stars, you have to reply yes/no to the question “Did the driver ask for extra cash?” This led to the drivers being very reluctant whenever I told them to keep the change, even when I showed them I had already selected “no”. So we often went around to fruit sellers asking if they would break a twenty.
And:
Mozambique shares a timezone with all the other Southern African countries. As the easternmost country in the timezone, this feels really weird! When I arrived, sunrise was at 5:20am, and sunset about 12 hours later. The early sunsets move business and social events earlier throughout the day. I’m a morning person, but it would usually be considered rude to suggest a 7am in-person meeting. Not here!
The Kalashnikov is a prominent national symbol in Mozambique; it’s on the flag. In particularly touristy areas, hawkers would try to sell me flags, jerseys, banners, scarves with ever-larger AK-47s on them.
Recommended, there should be more travel writing like this.
Time to Privatize U.S. Air Traffic Control—Copy Canada’s Model
Yesterday, the FAA grounded flights at Reagan (DCA) because there weren’t enough air traffic controllers. By mid‑afternoon, thousands of flights were delayed nationwide. The same thing is happening at major airports across the country.
The proximate cause is that the FAA is short about ~3,500 controllers, forcing the rest to work mandatory overtime, six days a week, and now, during the shutdown, sometimes without pay! The more fundamental problem is that we have a poorly incentivized system. It’s absurd that a mission‑critical service is financed by annual appropriations subject to political failure. We need to remove the politics.
Canada fixed this in 1996 by spinning off air navigation services to NAV CANADA, a private, non‑profit utility funded by user fees, not taxes. Safety regulation stayed with the government; operations moved to a professionally governed, bond‑financed utility with multi‑year budgets. NAV Canada has been instrumental in moving Canada to more accurate and safer satellite-based navigation, rather than relying on ground-based radar as in the US.
NAV CANADA – in conjunction with the United Kingdom’s NATS – was the first in the world to deploy space-based ADS-B, by implementing it in 2019 over the North Atlantic, the world’s busiest oceanic airspace.
NAV CANADA was also the first air navigation service provider worldwide to implement space-based ADS-B in its domestic airspace.
Meanwhile, America’s NextGen has delivered a fraction of promised benefits, years late and over budget. As the Office of Inspector General reports:
Lengthy delays and cost growth have been a recurring feature of FAA’s modernization efforts through the course of NextGen’s over 20-year lifespan. FAA faced significant challenges throughout NextGen’s development and implementation phases that resulted in delaying or reducing benefits and delivering fewer capabilities than expected. While NextGen programs and capabilities have delivered some benefits in the form of more efficient air traffic management and reduced flight delays and airline operating costs, as of December 2024, FAA had achieved only about 16 percent of NextGen’s total expected benefits.
Airlines bleed money when planes idle, gates clog, and crews time out. The airlines have every reason to demand reliability, capacity, and modernization—Congress does not. Thus, fund air traffic control with user fees paid by those who depend on performance. Put the airline executives on the board of the non-profit, as in Canada. Give them the power to tax themselves to benefit themselves.
Align power with incentives and performance will follow.
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
What should I ask Dan Wang?
Yes, I will be doing a podcast with him. Dan first became famous on the internet with his excellent Christmas letters. More recently, Dan is the author of the NYT bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Here is Dan Wang on Wikipedia, here is Dan on Twitter. I have known him for some while. So what should I ask him?
What should I ask Blake Scholl?
The Boom guy doing supersonic flight! I will be doing a podcast with him at the forthcoming Roots of Progress Institute event. He already has told “his story” on the supersonic side a number of times, so what else of interest should we cover? For background, here is Blake on Wikipedia.
What to read for travel
When you land in a new destination, what should you read? It’s hard to find good material with search engines because the space is SEO’d so aggressively. A Wikipedia article is fine insofar as it goes, but inevitably misses much of the texture of a place. I think it’d be neat if there was some kind of service that collated great travel writing — especially pieces that capture something of the context of a place. (See the Davies post below.) To this end, I made guide.world.
From Patrick Collison, recommended, lots of great reading (and travel) there.