And so we went. Oliver, who was born in Estonia in 1974 when it was part of the U.S.S.R., was impressed. “It’s a real achievement,” he told me afterward. “What used to be the grimmest and gloomiest of all places in Russia has been turned into a beacon of historical truth and freedom of thought.” I had been moved also. Something about the experience jogged my memory. I thought of Ayn Rand — my favourite novelist when I was 19 — and something she once said. I looked up the quotation and started my article with it, in the original context:

“Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” Rep. John McDowell of the House Committee on Un-American Activities asked the novelist Ayn Rand. “You paint a very dismal picture.” It was 1947 and Rand, a Russian émigré, was giving testimony before the committee regarding life in Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

“Look,” Rand retorted, “it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free.”

Had McDowell been able to see Perm-36, the last remaining Gulag forced-labor camp, which is now a tourist attraction and memorial, he’d have needed no further explanation. As I toured the facility myself recently, I wondered the same thing I’ve wondered while beholding the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the former KGB prison in Lithuania, and the wrecked streets of East Timor: How did this ever seem like the right thing?

You can read the whole article here, without being a WSJ subscriber.

This week The Wall Street Journal ran my story about the adored and adorable Pitt Rivers museum of ethnography and world archeology in Oxford, England (as opposed, I guess, to Oxford, Mississippi). You can read it here. For length, they did cut an anecdote about my first visit:

It was 2002, and I was just starting a year of graduate management studies at Oxford University. My friend Roland, an Egyptologist in my college whom I’d met “in hall” (i.e., at one of the nightly formal, gowns-required dinners that passes for normal mealtime at Oxford), toured me around the museum’s labyrinth of curiously labeled curio cabinets: “Snuff-Taking Equipment,” “Amulets, Cures and Charms,” and “Treatment of Dead Enemies,” where I came nose to nose with some shrunken human heads.

Examining the case marked “Origins of Writing,” we were approached by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer who wanted to record our feedback. I remember Roland, who was fluent in more dead languages than living ones, remarking: “Oh, this place is wonderful! But I’m afraid I do have to tell you: this cuneiform tablet is upside down.” The docent flushed; I laughed. To a mere mortal, this is like noticing that a Japanese flag is hanging backward. But that’s Roland for you.

Read “Where Shrunken Heads are a Big Attraction” in it’s entirety.

That’s the lead-in to my Wall Street Journal story on Easter Island (“Before the Trees Disappeared”). For space, the Journal cut a few interesting asides and one paragraph where I quoted Jared Diamond (the Guns, Germs and Steel guy) from his chapter on Easter in his book Collapse.

Mr Diamond nicely, if a touch shrilly, sums up the story’s modern relevance: “Easter’s isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources….The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth [sic] is today in space….These are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our future.”

In another excised aside, I’d mentioned that whilst Diamond and others — especially devoted environmentalists — have helped popularize this epic warning, and although archeologist William Mulloy first stated it in the 1960s, according to Sergio Rapu, the Easter Island archeologist whose Elderhostel charges I joined on a tour of the island, it was actually Margaret Thatcher who brought it to the world’s attention at the G8 summit in Houston in 1990. To the degree that Easter’s warning is a valid one for the whole of civilization, let’s give credit to [the conservative!] she who first raised the alarm.

The final aside, which I didn’t manage to work into my original draft, is the odd fact that Easter Island’s airstrip is apparently much longer than those at many major international airports: it was expanded to be used as an alternative landing place for the space shuttle! Ancient meets modern — and again, Easter’s isolation was the reason.

To see a cool experiment in how to make a giant stone head walk under its own power, watch this 7-second YouTube video.

Stanford's ground in Antigua

The Wall Street Journal solicited my Yank-in-London’s take on this other Yank in London, cricket upstart and all-hat/all-fur-coat (depending on whose English you’re speaking) Sir Allen Stanford.

I collaborated with my friend Malcolm Bracken who knows a thing or two about cricket. Together we wrote:

“The tale of Allen Stanford — Texas billionaire, cricket enthusiast, and, it is now alleged, major fraudster — is one of a kind, drawing together, in one odd and oddly compelling saga, the English national pastime, the economy of Antigua, Bernie Madoff, a dodgy knighthood and an ice chest full of U.S. dollars.”

You can read the whole thing if you want.

Many of the places featured in Bond films — from the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul (“From Russia with Love”) to the Louisiana bayou (“Live and Let Die”) — I’ve since visited myself, and I’ve always gotten an extra kick out of them because they’d been in the movies.

In fact, getting a place into a movie is a tried-and-true place branding technique. It is quick-acting, and for better or worse, can have a very long tail. (Midnight Express director Oliver Stone was still apologizing to Turkey more than 25 years after the film’s debut for “overdramatising” some negative aspects of the country).

Meanwhile, Bond’s creator Ian Fleming, himself an inveterate traveller and man of the world, “turn[ed] fiction into fact with a ‘Baedeker’ as exotic as any of his famous adventure novels — with a specific guide to tantalizing pleasures, fantastic sights, and memorabilia in his choice of the most thrilling cities of the world.” My own copy of Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, from whose dustjacket copy that quotation was lifted, I found at a library sale a dozen years ago in Westport, Connecticut (which is not itself a thrilling city).

Anyway, it wasn’t appropriate to get into luscious locales in my review of the Bond-Fleming exhibit at the Imperial War Museum which ran in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, but I sneaked in one line about it.

Update (23 March 09): Just ran across the James Bond Lifestyle web site.