I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and … - Teju Cole

WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.

Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, rises out of the Sahel like a modernist apparition. The avenues are clean and broad and the government buildings are imposing, with that soulless, vaguely fascistic air common to all capitals cities of the world…

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.