For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake - Salman Rushdie

Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, a valueless quality — actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn’t really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw — these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared. Where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd.