Author Archive

The Week in Tweets

RT @californiamag: As students move in, President Yudof's housing woes make news. http://nyti.ms/dbVv3u # @joemfbrown I wonder if that commercial makes Salman Rushdie hate Hardee's and its thickburger. in reply to joemfbrown # @donlbe Congrats on the new job. Very cool project over there. # @longshotmag Ever see It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World? [...]

29th August 2010 | Posted in ephemera | No Comments »



Why Slate’s article on toilet squatting reminds me of the imprisoned Shane Bauer.

Why? Because he wrote a very similar piece a while back. You can read it here: The Toiletization of the West Both Shane Bauer’s and today’s piece by Daniel Lametti in Slate share many of the same ideas: the Sikirov research, the first-world/third-world toilet divide, the physiological contortions spurred by modern toiletry, and of course [...]

26th August 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in ideas, journalism | No Comments »



The Week in Tweets

Beautiful, I've gotten the same shot! rt @joemfbrown Amazing views from Twin Peaks this evening. http://yfrog.com/6baatwj # .@Wired made a provocative declaration and now everyone's talking and tweeting and writing folos. Boy, did they screw up! # In other news, Chris Walken guest-hosted Leonard Lopate's show: http://bit.ly/aszb5X (via the half of the internet not yelling [...]

22nd August 2010 | Posted in ephemera | No Comments »



Is there anything you can say when quoted while eating a truffle-flavored french fry that does not make you sound like a jerk?

I suspect not. Lynn Hirschberg’s final celebrity profile for the NYT Magazine knocks the musician M.I.A. down a notch or two on the credibility scale. M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, comes across as possibly well-meaning, but also self-righteous and misguided. (And reminds us of how much we love the term “radical chic.”) Hirschberg includes little observations [...]

27th May 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in journalism, language | No Comments »



Lonely Horse

Remember that song from the ’80s by Yes? “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” When I heard that as a kid, I misheard the lyrics. I was convinced they were singing about the “owner of the lonely horse.” (I also thought Starship “milked this city.” I was wrong.) It was not until I was nearly out [...]

31st December 2009 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in animals, music, photography, really? | No Comments »



Changing Wheels: More multimedia journalism very quickly

When trains cross certain borders—entering China from Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example—they have to stop and change wheels. The wheel assemblies, called trucks or bogies, used on trains in Mongolia (and Belarus and Kazakhstan and pretty much all of the old Russian Empire) won’t work in China. These two countries have different rail [...]

31st December 2009 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in anticipation, journalism | No Comments »



The Mendocino County Crab

Some time back in the summer of 2008, I joined my friend Mark Sung for a short trip to the Mendocino coast. We meant to go camping, but the tent spots were full and we ended up fishing until about 4 a.m., anyway. Actually, we weren’t fishing for fish, but crabbing for crab. Mendocino’s a [...]

31st December 2009 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in animals, anticipation, food | No Comments »



David Levine

A great talent whom I’d meant to write more about sooner. He died today. I knew his work through the New York Review of Books, for which he’d been drawing for nearly 50 years. Some of my favorites of his include: He drew with an appealing wit and detail. The circumstances of the job meant [...]

29th December 2009 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in art | No Comments »



Maiden Lane

A lot of text, lately, on this blog, so I’ll keep this brief. This is a picture I took after some rain in downtown San Francisco. This is Maiden Lane, near Union Square, a stretch of high-end boutiques and shops. A pair of opera singers used to set up at one end and sing, but [...]

2nd July 2009 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in San Francisco, photography | No Comments »



Trip the Kite Fantastic

It’s fun to take pictures from high up. A few years ago, a friend working as a wedding planner let me roam around the top floor of the Bank of America building as she set up someone’s wedding ceremony. These were the best sustained views of San Francisco I’ve ever had. In the picture above, [...]

1st July 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in art, cool | 1 Comment »



Devoted to a Fault, Conclusion: Education, preparation, and the stadium

Read Part I and Part II of Devoted to a Fault. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008. The 1868 Earthquake Alliance held its April 2008 meeting in an Oakland building undergoing a seismic retrofit. In the lobby, plywood and [...]

12th June 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in earth | 2 Comments »



Devoted to a Fault, Cont’d: The past, the future, and the Claremont Resort

This is Part II of this article. Read Part I here. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008. At 7:53 in the morning on October 21, 1868, a major earthquake struck the Bay Area. It had a magnitude of about [...]

11th June 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in earth | 2 Comments »