The Atlantic

Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand are not partners. Nonetheless, there is something dyadic about these two. Gervais is 47, dumpy and comfortable-looking. He’s a strict materialist: one of his stand-up routines involves reading aloud from the book of Genesis, while the audience falls about laughing. His characteristic expression is a slightly canine leer. Brand is 34, lanky, dark-complexioned, black-clad, immoderately sensual, lightly bearded, and announced in silhouette by an outrageous nimbus of back-combed hair: in full panoply, with his boots and bullet belt and chains and eyeliner, he looks like Chewbacca’s girlfriend. He describes himself as “a spiritual gent” and closes his stand-up act with a pious “Hare Krishna.”

In a lushly beautiful corner of China, an experiment is under way to determine how lush and beautiful the country can remain—or become—as its economy continues to grow. The test is occurring in Yunnan province, the hilly and subtropical area just north of Burma, Laos, and Vietnam, and it has brought together an improbable combination of American and Chinese personalities, institutions, and historical connections.

Every time I steered my boat past a stone bridge abutment, I’d begin to whisper-sing, “Low bridge, everybody down / Low bridge, for we’re coming to a town.” Certainly that irrepressible song is what comes to most people’s minds when they hear mention of this historic waterway, even if they’ve never “navigated on the Erie Canal.” As a native upstate New Yorker, I had decided it was time to broaden my canal repertoire, and get on the water.