In the Oct. 4 issue of The New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a fascinating piece on the uncertainties surrounding the current Dalai Lama’s succession—the only contemporary geopolitical issue, he remarks, that hangs on a matter of reincarnation. In the course of the article, Osnos also delivers an excellent overview of the Dalai Lama’s fraught role as the de facto leader of the Tibetan autonomy movement, a position about which His Holiness himself is strikingly ambivalent.
Read the article here (subscription required).