Matt Damon IS Edward Snowden

After fleeing the US and then Hong Kong, Edward Snowden remains (as far as we know) holed up somewhere in Moscow’s airport beyond the reach of American authorities. The story of the hunt for the NSA whistleblower and attempts to stop him before he leaks again seems inevitably headed for Hollywood, just like the story of WikiLeaks before it

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Have Ideas, Will Travel

In River of Smoke, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh banishes one of his characters, a French orphan, to a ship anchored near Hong Kong, then just a “wild, gale-swept” island off the coast of Macau. Paulette spends nearly the entire novel waiting there for news of a rare flower, the Golden Camellia, from a friend in Canton’s foreign quarter — “threshold of the last and greatest of all the world’s caravanserais.” In the 19th century, these South China Sea ports bustled with people on their way to someplace else, and Ghosh meets me in the 21st century equivalent — a New Delhi airport-hotel bar called Savannah.

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A Bordeaux Bubble

Late last year, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, an anonymous Chinese phone bidder paid $232,000 each for three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite Rothschild, a Napoleon III — era wine that was already maturing nicely when the Boxer uprising stymied European imperial ambitions in China. That price smashed the previous record of $156,450, paid in 1985 by the Forbes publishing family for a 1787 Lafite bottled for U.S.

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