With William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain as his on-again, off-again guide, Tyler Stiem spent a couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. Here, he adds to his collection of sound recordings of muezzin calls to prayer.

After a lengthy (foreign) absence, contributor Andrew Gregg returns… I’m not a car guy so when my friends who are car guys started going on about BBC’s program Top Gear, I didn’t pay much attention. And then I was on a British Airways flight and I watched an entire season of Top Gear on the telly. [...]

While in Ghana researching my article on African Pentecostalism now in The Walrus, I also spent time observing and interviewing people involved in African traditional spirit worship. In particular, I visited the Black and White Powers Shrine in Kumasi several times, and spoke with its founder and fetish priest, Nana Abas.

During my recent Brazil excursion to research the book I stopped in Salvador, without much of a specific agenda. I had long wanted to visit, mostly because the city and the surrounding state of Bahia, predominantly Afro-Brazilian, have had such a definitive influence on the country's culture (from samba to candomblé and capoeira).

CULTURE | Having spent much of the last 15 years photographing the world's tattooing cultures, indigenous and otherwise, Chris Rainier long-hauls it to the Indonesian island of Siberut. There he finally meets the Mentawai, one of the planet's best preserved, most ancient body art cultures.

MUSIC | David Byrne on how his travels in Asia changed the way he thinks about performance.

(Photo: Cf.) Our boat floats up to Abrozinho’s dock, past a drowned tree, fútbol goal posts part-submerged, and a water-logged canoe. This is not uncharacteristic for the rainy season, as many ribeirinhos (river people) of Amazonia tend to settle on or near alluvial floodplains (várzea), living in floating houses, or, like Abrozinho, shanties erected on wood [...]

CULTURE | A night of Boi Bumbá, the more psychedelic, Amazonian version of Carnaval.

(Photo: Heidelberg Project, Michael Takasaki) Following up on last post: In Detroit, at least, there’s already a number of projects underway that are designed to staunch the bleeding in neighborhoods struggling with urban decay and foreclosure. Boing Boing led me to James Griffioen’s marvelous set of photos of the abandoned Detroit Public School Book Depository, which [...]

[Photo: Tyler Stiem] As falls from grace go, mine was humbler than that of Dawda Jawara, the president-for-life who’d been overthrown in a bloodless coup a few years before my arrival in the Gambia, but it was also, in its way, pretty humbling. It was my first time in Africa. I’d accepted a job as a writer [...]