I started my professional life as Finance Editor of Tokyo’s now-dead Asahi Evening News, and spent the next decade reporting from a wide array of countries for a variety of now-dead, soon-to-be-dead, and barely-hanging-on newspapers. I continue to write for several living publications, including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, and Washington Monthly. A few years into my journalistic career I persuaded a kind editor to let me retrace the pathways of an ancient Sanskrit epic, and that was how I wrote Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God.

Writing (it might surprise you to learn) is not always the most reliable way to pay one’s bills. Once my book advance ran out, I decided to supplement my literary work with a surefire sell-out moneymaker: Academia. I figured I’d spend a few years at the world’s most self-important university (yes, that one), and emerge when I had my next book deal in hand. I ended up staying for a doctorate in Anthropology, and conducted the discipline’s first ethnographic fieldwork among the Daudi Bohras (a Shi’a Muslim community centered in India and spread across every habited continent). I explored how this fascinating group uses the tools of modernity to combat the threats posed by modernity That work became my second book, Mullahs on the Mainframe.

While Mullahs was in the publication process, a guy named Joe Biden asked me to spend a year in government. Actually, he didn’t ask: He just said, “See you on Monday,” and that was that. To my surprise (and frequent dismay), I ended up serving twelve years as Policy Director for South and Southeast Asia on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Since leaving government, I’ve returned to the worlds of writing and academia. For four years I was based in Southeast Asia (first Indonesia, then Singapore). Now I’m back in Washington DC. I assume not much has changed while I was away?