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The Venezuelan capital Caracas can be one of the most expensive cities in the world — or one the cheapest. It all depends on how you exchange your dollars.

At a fast food restaurant in the city I recently ordered a pretty tasty plate of chicken and rice and it cost me 160 bolivars. At the official exchange rate set by the government, that works out to more than 25 dollars. But at the black market rate, it's just two bucks.

So needless to say, most anyone who can change money on the black market in Venezuela does so.

As one person told me: "For people like me who are paid in dollars, it's easier and better to change your dollars at the black market where the price is higher and its much easier than the official rate."

He didn't want his name used because changing money on the black market is a crime that can come with a 6-year jail sentence.

In most countries, you change your dollars for the local currency at a price the market deems fair. In Venezuela, the government fixed the price at 6.3 bolivars to the dollar.

But the black market says that price is ridiculously low. Recently, one U.S. dollar in Venezuela could get you up to 90 bolivars. The rate has come down since then.

Reuters reported that the black market rate was about 58 bolivars to the dollar on Monday, the same day that the government introduced the new exchange system.

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On this quote from the book, highlighting how exciting life is in Nigeria: "I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes."

After writing that, I went on and wrote Open City, a book in which nothing happens. I took a very long walk in an American city and the narrator got up to not very much. And I think that quote, actually, is a pretty good example of sort of not taking what's in the book as the author's own view.

... The next line goes on to talk about if John Updike had had material that was more than Shillington, Pennsylvania, he probably would have won the Nobel Prize by now. And that's a dig at a man who at that time was still living, and is sadly gone away now, but it was maybe a little bit of a rhetorical move, and the reality is that there are important stories to be told from any corner of the world.

Having said all of that, Nigeria I find excessively exciting. It's actually overwhelming.

On the narrator's internal debate over why he doesn't live in Lagos, which he finds so invigorating.

I think that particular part was a little bit of an exploration of what a returnee's crisis might be. You know, it's a little bit of a trope ... you go to a place that you know well, and you just say "Well, why can I not return, why can't I live here?" ... There's a sort of vague sense of responsibility toward the place that formed you and all that. So I wanted to sort of dramatize that line of thought.

But for me, personally, I have not actually, really considered seriously living in Nigeria full time. This is my home here [New York and the United States] and this is the place that allows me to do the work that I do. ... I'm fortunate to be able to travel to many places, and to go to Nigeria often. And so I feel close enough to the things happening there without needing to live there.

Maybe I'm less angry and cranky about it because I don't have to live there, and I don't want to put myself in a situation where I then hate a place because I force myself to be there.

“ The first move towards true equality is to have the person you're addressing understand that you're just as complex as they are, and that your stories are just as important as theirs are.

Front Stage And Back Stage Behavior

Another concept Conley talks about is "front stage and back stage" behavior, a term invented by mid-century sociologist Erving Goffman that describes how we behave when we're with different social groups. Front stage being how we act in public, and backstage being our more "authentic self" and how we act when we're with our more intimate social groups.

Conley says he allows his kids to vent and curse at him in private as long as they're doing their homework, for instance. But in public, of course, they need to be totally respectful. He says the idea is to give them an outlet.

"Kids, especially as they hit adolescence, need certain outlets," he says. "If you are an authoritarian parent that demands total respect and don't have that connection to allow your kids, not necessarily to curse you, but to vent their frustration, and to talk intimately with you, then it's going to come out in the public sphere where you really don't want it to come out."

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Japan has agreed to hand over to the U.S. a decades-old stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium that is said to be large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons.

The 700-pound cache, which had been maintained by Japan for research purposes, would be turned over to the U.S. for safe-keeping, according to an agreement finalized at the G7 nuclear summit in The Hague. It's part of an administration push to secure such prevent the nuclear material from being stolen by potential terrorists.

"This is a very significant nuclear security pledge and activity," U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told reporters at the summit in the Netherlands. "The material will be transferred to the United States for transformation into proliferation-resistant forms."

Yosuke Isozaki, a senior national security adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said through a translator that: "Japan shares a vision of a world without nuclear weapons."

The New York Times reports:

"The Japanese agreement to transfer the material has both practical and political significance. For years these stores of weapons-grade material were not a secret, but they were lightly guarded at best; a reporter for The New York Times who visited the main storage site at Tokaimura in the early 1990s found unarmed guards and a site less-well protected than many banks. While security has improved, the stores have long been considered vulnerable.

"Iran has cited Japan's large stockpiles of bomb-ready material as evidence of a double standard about which nations can be trusted. And last month China began publicly denouncing Japan's supply, in an apparent warning that a rightward, nationalistic turn in Japanese politics could result in the country seeking its own weapons.

"At various moments right-wing politicians in Japan have referred to the stockpile as a deterrent, suggesting that it was useful to have material so that the world knows Japan, with its advanced technological acumen, could easily fashion it into weapons."