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? [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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