The following is a series of aerial photographs taken from my solo trip to Brazil’s financial capital. Photos were captured from a helicopter using my handheld Canon Mark IV DSLR and a 24-70mm Tamron f/2.8 lens. The aim of the flight was to capture the sheer expanse of the largest city in the Western and Southern Hemispheres.
Every year I set a target number of books to read. Although I try to frame it more as an intention, the act of goal-setting does inevitably spark a sense of competition, if only against myself. For the first time, I wound up listening to more audiobooks than turning actual physical pages. (Digital e-readers still remain a no-go.) For me, the modality does depend on the genre.
For going on seven years, I’ve used the same 1 Second Everyday (1SE) app to record a nearly 37 minute long video montage of my life. It’s a project that’s now outlasted one relationship, five homes, and the lifespan of three cell phones.
It was a spur of the moment, decade-old friendship, reunion at what I determined to be the state midpoint between California and Oregon. After an ice rescue in the Sawtooth Mountains, accidental submersion in the Boise Greenbelt, four traffic stops and three speeding tickets later, I turned to my friend and asked ‘So, what do we think of Idaho?’
After a nonfiction-heavy past year, my main goal included incorporating more fiction and fantasy into my reading rotation. It wasn’t difficult. Fantasy was my first and favorite genre. At ten years old, I was so obsessed with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy that I taught myself the Númenórean script to replicate one of Galadriel’s farewell gifts to the Fellowship for show and tell day at school. My classmates were not impressed.
In 2018, I climbed the tallest peak in the contiguous USA, Mount Whitney. From the summit, I remember looking down (slightly dizzy from the thin atmosphere) and making a resolution to return to its sister site: Death Valley.
You probably don’t need to look at the airspace map over New York City to guess. There are very few places where you can fly in Manhattan proper without LAANC waivers. But that’s not the end of it. A 1948 city law (written more for flying saucers than for drones) prohibits taking off or landing outside of airports or heliports…
I haven’t always been a solo traveler. The idea was first enacted by a friend, who deferred college to work and pay for a solo backpacking trip across Europe and the Middle East. We have similar interests and perspectives. As children we were more comfortable with books than with people and spent school delinquencies visiting museums instead of at furtive school yard hangouts.
There was nothing methodical about my book selection this year. Sometimes it was what was available in the library. I read “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine” after my library hold was delivered to the wrong location. “Life in a Putty Knife Factory” and “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” were swiped from a friend’s bedside stack. “Say Nothing,” and “Heavy,” were recommended by colleagues. “Crimes Against Logic” was sitting on my own bookshelf, shamefully unread, for years.
Visiting New England for two weeks during a global pandemic meant planning, planning, planning! Carefully timed Covid-19 tests, double-masked flights, and as much outdoor and hiking time as the available late-fall light allowed.
Along the rocky bluffs in the 90-acre Fort Williams Park sits one of the most recognizable lighthouses in the USA: the historic Portland Head Light. The iconic Cape Elizabeth lighthouse is nestled just south of Portland, Maine, which also boasts the new light of my life: a “palace of poutine” must Maine eatery, Duckfat.
Picture the American Midwest and the image is probably one from Utah. Mountains, plateaus, red-sand deserts, twisting spires and hoodoos. The variety in the natural landscape is seemingly endless.
My 2020 Halloween spent in a clawfoot tub in the middle of rural Utah was surprisingly not my first spent in a bathtub. But the naturally heated spring water pouring out of impressionist painting looking, rust-colored mounds ensured the experience wasn’t a reductive one.
It was a birthday trip to remember. The milestone age of 30 in the midst of a pandemic. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ‘faraway is not a place’ mantra. But for this particular hallmark birthday, I wanted actual perspective. The kind of existential life-lived-thus-far rumination I had planned needed both physical and mental distance from my near-militant daily routine.
I learned how to drive a manual transmission in San Francisco. Public shaming and stalling repeatedly on 40% graded hills? It’s that kind of, ‘toss the child into the pool to teach them how to swim’ style of parenting that’s become a little outmoded. But here I am, nearly 15 years later, learning how to fly my drone in San Francisco, where the airspace looks like this…
When my alarm went off, at first I thought I had mistakenly set it for the middle of the night. But by midday in California, the lights were still on. As more than 2.5 million acres burned during California’s worst fire season on record, the strange melange of smoke from some-odd 25 active wildfires mixing with advection fog turned the day into an orange-hue night.
Coming down the mountain, we were struck by this startling cloud formation. Once back in cell reception territory we were floored to discover that what looked like a supernatural Greek mythology creation was actually an extreme manifestation of a cumulonimbus flammagenitus, also known as the pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a fire-aided or caused convective cloud.
When the CZU Lightning Complex started as an apocalyptic 3:00am thunder and lightning storm and it began raining ash in Big Sur it was decided, two-days in, the planned quarantine-style camping trip was out. Living in between the insulated bubbles of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it’s sometimes easy to forget that us Californians reside in the most natural-disaster prone state in the US.
If you’ve ever had trouble wrapping your brain around the concept of fractals, you’re in good company. Famed quantum mechanics physicist Richard Feynman once admitted to not fully understanding them (in the same breath that he provided their precise mathematical definition).
Elephant seals, bobcats, bear tracks, oh my! The King Range Wilderness is all that…wild. And remote. Add sea otters, starfish, crab shells, rocks of all sizes and sand in every array of solidity and you have the Lost Coast. A spectacular trail along one of the few pristine coastlines along California’s Pacific Ocean.
Dear Amsterdam, I’m sorry Guillaume doesn’t like you. He insists you are elitist, snooty, and tall. I agree with him on the last point. You are, unnervingly, tall. I wonder what it’s like to experience the world from such heights. You also serve dry toast with chocolate sprinkles for breakfast…
I came to Rotterdam to see the world-famous jewel of post-modern architecture and innovation myself. For its experimental buildings and urban foundations have a fiction-sounding backstory. During the second world war, poised to invade, the Germans sent a message: you have 24 hours to surrender or we’ll destroy your city.
Did you know you can survive on Belgian waffles? You absolutely can. I’m not saying it is a balanced way to live, but sometimes it’s nice to reassert your personal autonomy. Like the Lonely Island in their comedy-rap track “Threw it on the Ground.” Screaming “I’M AN ADULT” at a child is a nice way to remind them that, once you reach a certain age, you take full responsibility for your life decisions.
I can’t speak to when the allure of libraries struck. But for me books themselves are reason alone. Enough, even, to overlook the 70s-era buildings of my hometown, with their grayish yellow carpet and exposed pipe ceilings. Minus a handful of major metropolitan libraries, the USA is no competition for the grandeur many other parts of the world have constructed to house their most beloved manuscripts.
As a child I felt much more at home with books than with people. (My personal sequence, in descending order, actually goes animals → books → other humans). College practically dispelled the booklover in me. What is a postsecondary education without unrealistic weekly word counts and perpetual exhaustion? Not one I recognize.
For me, the soundtrack of London will always be punk rock. No matter how trite, The Clash album of London Calling fame plays in my head like a malfunctioning tape wherever I wander. Perhaps it’s allegiance borne from the time the record saved me from a speeding ticket. (Thank you, mystery police officer, with atypical taste in anarchist music.)
I’m a romantic, though I try my best to hide it. Occasionally, I can’t help my own inclinations — like the time I started bawling so uncontrollably during the first 10 minutes of Life of Pi that I had to excuse myself from the theater. The trope of the rich man taking the ingenue to the opera to assess her potential plays out over and over again in film, television, and books; especially if you are at all inclined to romantic plotlines.
Every day is like a Sunday. So goes the Austrian saying on the national imperative to eat, drink, and take general leisure in cafes that are as sumptuous in their décor as they are in patisserie. Now, a literati culture bolstered by chocolate cake and bitter coffee is a lifestyle I can really get behind; even if I have to re-label a day of the week’s character to something a little more rose-tinted.
The best time to visit the Grand Canyon just may be in mid-Fall. On my longest out-and-back backpacking trip to date, I trekked vertical miles through riparian, desert, and subalpine climates. Montane meadows, conifer and ponderosa pine forests. Every habitat variety from Canada to Mexico was represented; as well as every season. Winter on the North Rim. Fall in the base of the canyon. Summer in the river corridor.
Spanning the Danube is Budapest, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Perched atop ancient Celtic ruins and a fault line feeding more than 100 thermal springs, to me the Hungarian capital seemed like the very best of Paris, New York, and Berlin rolled into one.
Budapest has many hidden delights, but none more unique than the city’s homage to the neglect of its historic Jewish quarter. Ruin bars are the new phenom of café life in District VII. Combining the post-war Metabolism architecture trend with an oversupply of abandoned buildings, stores, and lots, ruin bars are a cornerstone of Budapest’s nightlife now twenty years in the making.
An interest in rock climbing feels like a Silicon Valley staple, not so dissimilar from the long distance running crowd in Boston. Here, as in many places around the world, the growing demand for the sport has engendered awe-inspiring books, podcasts, and even movies. My particular favorite follows legendary climber Alex Hannold in National Geographic’s Free Solo. (AKA the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.) A fascinating scene in the film shows Alex undergoing an fMRI scan, revealing the physiology of his brain may partly explain his success with the sport: his complete lack of fear.
Mt. Shasta, at 14,162 is an active volcano, made even more stunning as an isolated peak you can see from 150 miles away. Shrouded in glaciers, mysterious legends, and a fast-closing eruption window, of course I wanted to climb it!
Cognitive biases are a fascinating snapshot of what happens when our reasoning breaks down. With the rise of the internet, social media, and partisan news media – we’ve never been more empowered to construct worlds that match whatever it is that we want to see. Critical thinking cannot successfully direct our beliefs and actions unless it continually assesses our emotional states, as well as our implicit and explicit drives and agendas.
The Eastern Sierra Nevada. North America’s mountain range of geothermal intensity, gold-encrusted foothills and doomed Donner family-fame boasts the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States: Mt Whitney. It’s one of the most popular trails in the country.
Odds are you’ve heard the marathon origin story in one form or another. According to legend, an Athenian messenger traveled the modern-day marathon distance of 26.2 miles to announce victory over the invading Persian army before dying on the spot. The first historical account, written by Herodotus, tells a slightly different story.
This isn’t advice on how to conduct yourself while shooting street photography. That’s a topic which could easily fill many posts on its own. Rather, this is about the broad legal landscape – the dos, the don’ts and the greys – for those interested in documenting life as it happens. Street photography is still a controversial medium and privacy concerns are arguably more important now than they’ve ever been.
The garden of my home used to be covered in these glorious critters. They were drawn, year-round, to the temperate climate and flowering nectar plants meticulously cared for by my neighbor. And I lazily benefitted. It was not so uncommon to start my mornings with the sublime: sipping morning coffee amidst a mosaic of orange and black.
My mother instilled in all her children a love for language. Dinner discussions frequently involved word games, anagrams, and vocab flashcards, which probably evolved as a way to encourage talking from three morose and competitive teenagers. I guess it’s not too surprising then that, later in life, my brother and I found ourselves on opposite sides of a quintessentially 90s linguistic harangue.
Basel, a city where gothic spires rest beside industrial smokestacks and glassy pharmaceutical high rises. Storefronts advertising the latest gadgets share walls with antique cartographers and signet ring manufacturers. The contrast between old world and post-modern industry gives the city a romantic and modern flavor. And the cleanliness so extreme it’s noticeable.
You can’t visit Berlin without hearing about currywurst. This cold war sausage is an icon of German culinary culture and frequent guest feature of traveling foodies. Literally “curry sausage,” its basic form is a triumph of multiculturalism and post-war rationing — a pile of fried pork sausage (Germany), covered in ketchup (America), seasoned with spices and topped with curry powder (Britain and India).
When I started seriously considering leaving academia for a different career, everyone told me that I needed a social media presence: I had to “build my brand.” But the landscape of social media isn’t completely foreign to me. Sadly, there’s a Myspace page languishing in cyber-purgatory with my senior prom photo forever-pasted below a cheery optimistic handle. (Yes, I’ve tried taking it down.)
