Multi-storied

Among the pieces in the new Indian edition of The Web Beneath the Waves—which you will doubtless remember is not only the full text of my Web mini-book but also an anthology of 15 essays and works of reportage, and which you will also know was officially available in Indian bookshops as of yesterday, and which you are surely going to buy right away—is a piece first published in the Guardian, on the industrial intrigues between the hand dryer industry and Big Paper Towel. This piece is a keeper.

A week ago, we launched the Indian edition of The Web Beneath the Waves—which includes, you will recall, not just the text of that short book but also an anthology of 15 essays and pieces of reportage—at the Bangalore International Centre.

Look, it was always existentially precarious to embark on a writing career. I get that. Most books do poorly: bad reviews, bad sales, bad everything. Very, very few books do well enough for their writers to spend their lives just writing books.

Boys have strange ambitions. My earliest was to become a pilot, but my next one—which persisted for a long, long time—was to be an astrophysicist. Not an astronaut, a person who went into space—I never thought I was that cool—but rather the person who tried to figure out how the cosmos worked.

Recently, I went on two podcasts to talk about undersea data cables: Bloomberg’s Odd Lots, which I struggled with a hoarse throat; and One Decision, a podcast co-hosted by a former head of MI6. In both, the topic of the Strait of Hormuz came up pretty damn quickly. We’re suffering through a war that waged without provocation, and Iran’s closure of the Strait — however much pain it causes us in terms of inflated prices — can only be applauded.

From “Snow,” copyright Sohrab Hura I haven’t been nearly as regular here as I’d like to be—in part because our magazine Equator is voracious with the time of its small staff. As a result, I didn’t have the chance to do much writing until earlier this year. The first of a few pieces to come was published this past weekend by the New Yorker: a short essay about “Snow,” a volume of haunting images of Kashmir by the photographer Sohrab Hura.

I haven’t done much political reporting in India, compared to the veterans—but I’ve certainly spoken a lot to the veterans: worked alongside them, hung out with them over drinks, chatted with them on WhatsApp. I loved hearing their stories: tales of venality, cronyism, egoism, deep state-ism, and the intertwined circles of power beyond party politics. (The most memorable such story involves a prime minister, a cabinet minister, and a chocolate cake.

Many years ago, my wife and I met Latif Nasser, now the co-host of Radiolab (and a terrific guy), for breakfast. As often happens, our conversation turned to ideas for stories — and more precisely, how we find our ideas. I told him what I think is the truth: that I’m actually very bad at digging out completely new stories, and that quite often, I rely on my editors for ideas. Latif, on the other hand, is a pro at this, and so I asked him what advice he had for me.

Any young boy or girl setting out in the world must have questions about how to go about writing their first book. One answer certainly is: You get very lucky and fall ass-backwards into a book deal, and then before you know it, you’ll have written three more, and it will be time for a 15th-anniversary edition of your first one, and you’ll wonder where the years went.

It’s funny—I suppose I’m a magazine man through and through, having spent most of the last 15 years sweating over magazine pieces. But until recently, I’d never actually worked in a magazine, as a member of its staff. I’d never sat in on magazine edit meetings, or been on the other side of pitches, or been any other kind of cog in this machine. In part, this is because, by the time I got started in this business, the days of magazines hiring writers onto their staff were pretty much long gone.