The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.