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 [...]
Last week, with June 4 marking the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese officials blocked filming around Tiananmen by physically blocking shots. Below, the experience of BBC’s Beijing correspondent.
Umbrellas are one of the things I remember from Korea, Japan and China. As a boy, I think I [...]
Inevitably, I will post at least one of the seemingly numerous videos available of Ira Glass telling people how to tell stories. But until then, I’ll stick with the video below. It’s a clip from a Woody Allen film.
If you haven’t seen his Hannah and Her Sisters, I’m spoiling things a bit by putting [...]
Freeman Dyson is a global warming skeptic. This should not come as a surprise.
Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of the physicist, now in his 80s, as its cover story. He’s been ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study for the last several decades.
I liked the piece. There are some questions, [...]
On Monday morning, I got to see a glimmer of Bloomberg’s San Francisco office. The office, on the second floor of a converted pier on the Embarcadero, was highlighted in August 2007 as the largest leasing deal to come along in San Francisco since the dot-com boom eight years earlier.
At the time, the media [...]
This little news piece from 1981 is making the rounds. As the reporter notes, “this is only the first step in newspapers by computer”:
So many things to love here:
the “estimated two to three thousand home computer owners in the Bay Area”
the newspaper guy saying “and we’re not in it to make money. We’re probably [...]
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, [...]
Television news tends to hide the credits for stories. Take this little report from Coney Island:
Although the story is dominated by the so-called “talent,” the story was pitched, shot, and structured by Sonia Narang, who has a year-long fellowship at NBC. She produced it. (If you want to hear funny stories about your favorite television [...]
Diane Dale and I encountered each other on the expo floor at Greenbuild last month. It was a Thursday afternoon, the 20th of November, and the conference was in full swing. We’d initially walked past each other without quite realizing it, but were soon standing together in the middle of one of the paths between [...]
Geoff Marcy is a Berkeley professor of astronomy and, in little more than a decade, his research team has discovered about half of the known planets outside of our solar system. I sat in with him one night this fall as he used the Keck telescope to scan nearby stars for planets. The result is [...]
Yesterday was the International Forum of the gigantic Greenbuild Conference in Boston. The organizers of the forum invited me to speak and sit on a panel about New Communities in a green design context. My role was to discuss my Frontline/World story on the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle Village. There were about 350 people in [...]
The press is so totally in the tank for the Obama-Biden ticket. “My homeboy”?
What kind of an example does this set for young journalists?
Adorable. He did a good job. But I kept worrying that this would turn into a segment from a program called Wonder Showzen: Beat Kids.
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