Growing up in a port, you look outward. The low elephant grief of ships’ horns was the soundtrack of my Bristolian childhood. We were proud of our seafaring roots: my parents named my brother Mathew after the ship in which John Cabot sailed away from our city to discover the North American mainland (or so it was said: we weren’t having any of that Viking explorer nonsense).

Saxon settlers founded Bristol 1,000 years ago on the banks of the Avon in the southwest of England, although Romans had been there before them, as today’s arrow-straight roads reveal. The modern city is a riot of stone, unlike London, which is brick built. On either side of the gleaming cobbles of King Street, half-timber Tudor trows (inns) shoulder up to multistory car parks, the kind of historical overlap typical of this most organic of urban centers. On the elegant 19th-century streets of the Clifton neighborhood, neoclassical mansions exude the confidence of mercantile wealth built on sugar and slavery, as do the names of the streets—Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill—while around the Hotwells Spa, where slavers’ wives once enjoyed the waters, developers have moved in to renovate the Georgian townhouses.

If a single image represents Bristol, it is the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a soaring half hoop spanning the Avon. Initially funded by a wine merchant (a nice Bristolian touch, that), the bridge was eventually designed by a 24-year-old named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. All he wanted to do was build a bridge that held up, but in the process Brunel created a piece of beauty to rival the Pont Neuf. Incidentally, the tidal range of the Avon—a whopping 43 feet, the second highest in the world—meant that when ships were grounded at low tide, the crew were obliged to tie every last thing down, hence the still-current expression “shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

The surprising thing about the Museum Hotel is not what it is—a museum and a hotel—but where it is, in Cappadocia, in eastern Turkey.

For anyone who has traveled outside of Istanbul, there is the surprising slide in the quality of accommodation that occurs as soon as one leaves the city. Staffers rarely speak English, so when you ask for a salad they bring you a pillow. Water in the shower suddenly turns brown. While Turkey’s rapid economic growth (averaging 9 percent a year until recently) has received a great deal of attention, the fact that the wealth has led to the possibility of luxury travel throughout the country has been much discussed.

“The Museum Hotel is a property that has been expanding luxury in Turkey to areas beyond Istanbul,” Christos Stergiou tells me. Stergiou is the founder of True Greece (truegreece.com), one of Greece’s leading luxury-tour operators, a company that has received acclaim in Condé Nast Traveler, the Financial Times, Travel and Leisure, and many other outlets. He has recently expanded his brand to Turkey with True Turkey (trueturkey.com). “Until the last few years,” he says, “international-level luxury was largely restricted to Istanbul. Because our guests expect a certain level of comfort, it was hard for us to take them out of the city.”

Seen from a few miles out in the Indian Ocean, the jagged cluster of tall buildings rising up together in Perth’s central business district suggests a watchtower. Figuratively, the view outward from there—Perth is Australia’s lone west-coast city—is into emptiness in every direction.

As it happened, the first time I traveled to Perth was during the last days of apartheid in South Africa. Out-migration from the area then had grown so large it supported, for a while, regular flights to Perth—from Harare, Zimbabwe. So I flew straight east from Harare that time, across the full breadth of the Indian Ocean. The second time I visited I took a train west from Sydney, the India-Pacific. Halfway to Perth it crossed into the Nullarbor Plain, a treeless, arid landscape. Eventually, the unpopulated plain gave way to wooded hills, before we arrived in a city that suggested a colonial outpost somewhere in the tropics.

I’ve entered Perth from the barren north, too, after making a tour of Western Australia’s iron-ore mining districts in 2010. Back then, while the rest of Australia was struggling financially during a worldwide recession, Western Australia was running in the black. It was shipping high-grade iron ore to China, Brobdingnagian quantities of it, from ports on its northwest coast.

John Witzig is stunned that anyone would care enough about his surf photography to publish it as a book. “It has to be the world’s biggest fluke,” he says, speaking on the phone from his home near Angourie in New South Wales. The modesty is surprising coming from a guy who became infamous in the ’60s for essentially telling a continent of surfers they were second-rate, but the former firebrand of Australian surfing now sums up his career with the bio line “John Witzig got lucky when some of his friends got famous.”

Witzig had the good fortune of growing up in the middle of a surfing revolution—or “schism,” in his words, the heyday of which are captured in his new book, A Golden Age: Surfing’s Revolutionary 1960s and ’70s. At a time when surf culture was focused on California and mastery meant walking to the nose of your board and hanging 10, Witzig fell in with a group of Australian surfers who were experimenting with a faster, more gymnastic style of riding. Among them was George Greenough, a brilliant Californian expat who built small boards and rode them on his knees, making sharp turns and getting into the breaking part of the wave; there was also Nat Young, who won the 1966 world surfing championship in San Diego while riding the same torquing style.

The surf world shrugged off Young’s victory. “Surfing magazine completely ignored it,” says Witzig. “They ran the same old high-performance noseriding story again and again.” So Witzig, then 23, wrote a cri de coeur praising Australian shortboarding, “really amping it up,” and sent it to Surfer magazine, which amped it up further and gave it the bragging headline “We’re Tops Now.” “To say the shit hit the fan is a gross understatement,” says Witzig. “They got hate mail for years afterward.”

Boris Akunin, the popular Russian detective novelist—and one of the pen names of Grigory Chkhartishvili—announced last month that he was abandoning fiction and focusing on writing a political history of Russia. Akunin frequently shares his opinions on his influential blog, a platform from which he has organized talks and even mass demonstrations. Ever since Vladimir Putin laid claim to a third term as president in 2011, Akunin has emerged as one of the leaders of the opposition, organizing protests over evident fraud in the parliamentary elections that year. In a country where the president has demanded new history books that he must approve, Akunin is attempting to fight ideological whitewashing, one reader at a time.

Can you describe the area of Moscow that your house is in?

A test flight yesterday by a Boeing 787 Dreamliner began what the company hopes will be the final steps toward getting the green light to put the airplane back in the air. FAA approval of extensive changes to the airplane’s two lithium-ion battery packs would not mean that passengers will be boarding 787s immediately—it will take many weeks to retrofit the fleet of 60 or more airplanes already delivered to airlines, and even longer for the airlines to re-integrate the jets into their schedules. But for Boeing, it will be the beginning of the road back from the worst blow ever to its reputation.

But hold the applause.

First, the 787 will fly again without anyone—Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the National Transportation Safety Board—being sure of exactly what caused the battery failures that grounded the fleet in the first place.