Newsweek, Dec. 2017:

After covering the too long, too mean presidential campaign, I fled New York City for Nicaragua.

Witnessing the collapse of the American system has an edgy vibe I've always found compelling and even sexy, but I now realize it's much more fun observing institutional mayhem in places where (a) it's hot outside and (b) you can check out early and hop a C134 back to high ground.

The last time I paid attention to Nicaragua was in the 1980s, when the ostentatiously austere Colonel Oliver North was helping President Ronald Reagan covertly fund the rightist Contra death squads in their civil war with the Sandinistas, while his Farrah Fawcett-haired secretary Fawn Hall was shredding incriminating documents. As far as I was concerned, Central America--other than Costa Rica--is still, "Send lawyers, guns and money--Dad, get me out of here" territory.

But "Nica," as the natives call it, is now postrevolutionary. During the decades of the left's bloody effort to throw off a succession of dictators and their American-backed death squads, the literacy rate nearly doubled. Agrarian reform temporarily gave peasants a couple of acres and a rifle each. That experiment ended in national bankruptcy, and the oligarchs were invited back in. Nicaragua now has some peace, and a little prosperity. It also boasts thrilling apolitical diversions, like world-class surfing, "ash-boarding" down one of 17 volcanoes, zip-lining over jungles and sipping tropical cocktails made with the national rum at infinity pools overlooking crashing surf in the sunset.

Read the rest here.