A few days ago, the AP’s Daisy Nguyen published a report on the trend of building suburban-style developments around the world. Developers in China and India and Africa are looking to Southern California (pictured above, partially) for a growth model. While this should be alarming to anyone concerned about resources and climate change (and willing, [...]
Hao Zifu, retired miner, possibly former Red Guard. His working days were spent stooped in coal tunnels. At the end of the day, he had to lie on the ground to straighten his back. Hao Jiazhai, Shanxi Province, China. He’s holding two cigarettes. One is for me.
On November 18th, I’ll be one of the featured speakers at GreenBuild’s International Forum. GreenBuild is the US Green Building Council’s annual convention and expo. If you’ve heard of USGBC, it’s probably in relation to its work in administering LEED building standards for sustainable design. This year, Greenbuild is supposed to draw about 25,000 attendees [...]
I’ve run into parades by chance in several places, including a Shriners parade in New Hampshire, a children’s parade through Quepos, Costa Rica, and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City. In the picture above, a band pauses during a parade in New Delhi, held as part of the events observing the birthday [...]
Bollywood production with big Bollywood star comes to the Bay Area, and they wouldn’t let me take any photos. That’s the view toward their San Jose set yesterday. The city hall rotunda in San Jose was “Golden Gate, Inc.,” hence the sign outside. It is apparently also called “Golden Gate Engineering,” if the signs [...]
The franc is back in France, at least in one little village. After switching to the euro in 2002, France’s franc became obsolete. (The Swiss continue to produce their own last francs of Europe.) But some of the businesses in Collobrières are accepting the old francs in lieu of euros. According to the story in [...]
Kaplan has a worthy review of Donald Rumsfeld’s strategic legacy in the Atlantic. I’ll comment more on it later. But for now, a provocative point that Kaplan introduces in the piece’s lede: In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a [...]
The always worthy Frontline is airing a documentary tonight following young Chinese adapting to a changing urban environment: No shortage of stories coming from the city in China. (No shortage of cities in China; something like 100–or more–cities with populations that exceed one million.) I chalk this up, in part, to a fascination with people [...]
Gray skies are a common feature of many photos coming from Sichuan. Word is that it’s been raining. The destruction that follows an earthquake’s shaking is often the result of fire. San Francisco in 1906 is the classic example: in much of the city, whatever the shaking didn’t break later went up in flames. The [...]
Hard times around the globe these days. Earthquake in China. Cyclone in Burma. Tornados in the U.S. An enormous volcano on the verge of collapse in Chile. Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a story about a possible earthquake here in the Bay Area. One thing I’ve learned is starkly visible in [...]
I’ve been throwing ideas around lately to all kinds of people. They haven’t stuck, which is too bad. But one of them was to look at the history of the torch relay after reports that the IOC and Britain may forgo the tradition in the runup to the 2012 games. I kind of knew the [...]
Last August I went to northeast China and for the following five months I’ve been putting together a story about an eco-village in China. Or, rather, an attempted eco-village. Here’s how Frontline/World described it: “The village of Huangbaiyu in rural northeast China was supposed to be a model for energy-conscious design. The initial project was [...]
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
