We can open up our computers and Skype with someone, and we see them. It's like looking through a window. And we can surf the internet through our phones, and it's like our consciousness is far away. Or we can step through a airplane door and be in another continent a few hours away. So technology feels, to me, like the doors sort of already exist, at least emotionally.

So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.

For many people, there is an almost power to be found in prayer.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.