I also need to keep myself sane. So I keep my Kindle fully loaded and always pack my noise-canceling, wireless headphones, the Wirecutter-recommended Sony H.ear. Even if I’m stuck in some edge-of-the-world hotel, living off of granola bars, I can always recharge by escaping for an hour into a Grateful Dead show or the second act of “Doctor Zhivago.”

In which country did you find the way people use technology the most surprising and why?

I first went to Myanmar in early 2014, when the country was opening up, and there was no such thing as personal technology. Not even brick phones.

When I went back in late 2017, I could hardly believe it was the same country. Everybody had his or her nose in a smartphone, often logged in to Facebook. You’d meet with the same sources at the same roadside cafe, but now they’d drop a stack of iPhones on the table next to the tea.

It was like the purest possible experiment in what the same society looks like with or without modern consumer technology. Most people loved it, but it also helped drive genocidal violence against the Rohingya minority, empower military hard-liners and spin up riots.

People sometimes talk about this showing that Myanmar wasn’t “ready” to come online so rapidly. But it looked to me like the same distorting effect of social media I’d seen in any other country. Maybe the change was just more obvious because it happened so rapidly and Myanmar was already pretty messed up.