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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.

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

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Latest Essays

On Beauty (and Irony)

Since my dear friend, Cindylu, just published a post titled "On Beauty", I figure I might as well dig through my unpublished drafts and publish one with nearly the same title. I wrote this about a year and a half ago over a steaming glass of chai in Delhi, India. I'm...

[Colombia] San Ignacio Hospital's Kangaroo Program

First of all, let me emphasize that the super gringo accent is not mine. That belongs to none other than Mr. Steven Mansour. My yankee voice only makes the occasional brief cameo after the 5 minute mark. Steve did a great job producing the video, which documents the...

Hoy, mañana, y lo que viene

La primera vez que conocí Georgia en Londres, ella me explicó su estilo de poppletrotting (su apellido es Popplewell y 'trot' en inglés es trotar). Poppletrotting es una forma de viajar. Sin estrés, sin discusiones, con itinerarios flexibles, pero sin planes...

Jamaica

It was the half hour sliver of clock that is neither day nor darkness. But nobody realized. Not the prostitutes nor the cocktail waitresses nor my taxi driver, cheerfully escorting one more stranger back to the airport, back to where he came from. "Where do you come...

Nicholas Laughlin on the Eve of Calabash

This will have to be an English-only post until I get the video of Nicholas up on dotSUB and add Spanish subtitles. I'm currently at the Calabash International Literary Festival with Georgia, Nicholas, Annie, Kei, Peter, Jonathan, JJ, and company. Here's a video...

Explosions in Medellin, Peddlers in Madagascar, Street Food and Footpaths in Calcutta

Every two weeks we feature four to five posts by Rising Voices participants as a way of showcasing some of the finest content from new voices that are typically ignored by both traditional and new media. In order to make new voices heard, however, we must be willing...