

Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

About

Best Of

I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

Colophon

The tools that go into making this website.

See Tools

Latest Essays

Visiting Yemen

"Sana'a(Yemen)" by eesti I am often asked what countries I'd like to travel to that I have yet to visit. Ethiopia and Lebanon have long been two standard answers (probably because I love the food and music from both). Victor Kaonga's blog has convinced me to one day...

[Translation] Global Voices' Project Lingua: A complementary and alternative perspective to traditional media

The following is my translation of Paula Gonzalo's interview with Juan Arellano about the Lingua Project on Global Voices. Links have been changed to their English-language equivalents when possible. Juan Arellano is one of the bloggers who, beginning in 2007, has...

[Review] Darwin Among the Machines

George Dyson asks us this most reasonable question: if biologic life derived organically from the basic elements, then is it such a stretch to believe that biologic life will also one day derive from mechanical elements? After all, as Paul Romer asks, what is...

A View from Bad Gastein

It took me a while, but I finally got the hang of producing a QuickTime Virtual Reality 360 degree panorama. To have a look around hover your mouse over the image above, click, and drag it to the right or left. It's far from perfect - I have to get better at...

The Intriguing Accounts of Hemant Lakhani and Hiroo Onoda

On my run yesterday I came across two of the most interesting stories I've ever heard. The first came from Petra Bartosiewicz, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who is working on a book about the Justice Department's terrorism trials since 9/11. She followed the case...

Intangible Immortality

There are those uttered phrases that stay with us for longer than they ought to. They rise to the surface of our thoughts while we are cooking and echo inaudibly during long walks in solitude. One of those persistent utterances came to me a few weeks ago from Sunil...