Royal Mile

“It is sunny today, so Edinburgh is looking less gray, less depressed.”

It’s a bit too on-the-nose to see Edinburgh’s statue of Adam Smith surrounded by the zillions of tchotchke shops on the Royal Mile. I hesitate to start with the observation. It’s obvious and reductive.

That those shops are purported to all be owned by one Indian-Scottish family. This often-repeated aside has a whiff of anti-immigrant thinking to it, of …