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"If everything is humming along smoothly ... I just stand here, pivot, grab the garnishes, put them on the plates, call the table, look at the tickets," Proujansky says. "If everything is going smoothly, no one has to move, almost. Things start to fall apart when the two garde manger cooks are crossing each other up, the entremet cook forgot whatever she's doing and I have to run back there and cook it for her, and I can't look at the tickets and everybody's out of place. And it's like a wheel spinning and then it starts to lose its axis and then the whole thing just falls apart."

Talking with the chef, Gibney learns that tonight he will be filling in for the cook who usually does the meat. The stove where he'll be working is already hot. "I'll be standing right here for about eight hours sweating profusely over slabs of meat that are going in and out of these ovens," he says. "I will be spinning around back and forth like this all night and coordinating times and sending everything up there."

To the outsider it sounds like Gibney has a grueling night ahead of him, but he wouldn't have it any other way. He's ready for the dance to begin.

Air pollution has become the world's largest environmental risk, the World Health Organization says, killing an estimated 7 million people in 2012.

That means about 1 out of every 8 deaths in the world each year is due to air pollution. And half of those deaths are caused by household stoves, according to the WHO report published Tuesday.

The fumes from stoves that burn coal, wood, dung and leftover crop residues as primary cooking fuels contribute to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and respiratory infections.

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Cleaner, 'Greener' Cookstoves Need Better Marketing In Bangladesh

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.