the caricature of Donald Trump has become so familiar that it’s surprising to see him in the flesh and realize that, oh yes, there really is a living, breathing person named Donald Trump. The concept of Trump seems to have long ago – many billions of dollars and dozens of glassy towers and blonde wives ago – broken free from the flesh and blood to exist as a platonic ideal of Trumpness. The name has become so synonymous with wealth, brilliant deal-making, bold risk-taking, massive overleveraging, conspicuous consumption, reality show theatrics...

if it troubles Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to serve two masters, he doesn’t show it. The Chief Executive’s signature bow tie never seems off kilter. He speaks with the confident, lilting cadences of an extinct Imperial British bureaucracy. When he wants to emphasize a point, he doesn’t raise his voice, he whispers. But while Tsang was technically elected to office, he serves at the pleasure of Beijing. That puts him right at the fault line of the Chinese conundrum: how to marry the unpredictable dynamics of a super-charged economy without ceding...

when i arranged to fly to Kuala Lumpur to interview former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, I received a message from Anwar’s staff saying I would be met at the airport by Saiful Bukhari Azlan, a young aide. Before I could respond to the email, Saiful, 23, accused Anwar of sodomizing him in a luxury condominium. Anwar insisted the charge was untrue and politically motivated to destroy him as leader of the opposition. Someone else met me at the airport. Despite his impending arrest on the sodomy charges, Anwar agreed to meet me...

IF YOU’RE WEARING a garment with a respectable label, take a moment to check its zipper. (This may be tricky for female readers.) Ten-toone you’ll see the letters YKK on the pull tab. Yankee Whitcomb L Judson came up with the original idea for a zipper, and a Swede named Gideon Sundback patented it in 1917. Leave it to the Japanese to take a foreign technology and run away with the industry: YKK is the world’s largest zipper maker. contributing Editor Bernard Krisher knew founder Tadao Yoshida when YKK was struggling to gain acceptance in the...

Indians are fi nally feeling good about themselves, says Indian author Shobhaa De