selected essays

SKEWING
MALE

NOT LONG AFTER my history of Polynesian voyaging was published, I began to get emails from readers. This was not an unfamiliar experience; I’d had letters from readers before. But this was a very specific set of correspondents, one I was not expecting to hear from, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since. (more)

In the Footsteps of RLS

IN THE SUMMER of 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on a valedictory tour of the South Pacific. His health, never good, was in decline, and he believed, as he later recalled, that he “was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect”. He was not far wrong: he lived only another six years. (more)

On Being an Outsider

BEFORE I HAD any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them. (more)