“Lots of tourists view travel abroad as basically a chance to shop for regionally themed trinkets.”
hee - funny article on Slate about a grown man (well, a guy my age…) spending five days in Disneyland, not enjoying it all that much. reminiscent of A Supposely Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. i […]

it’s getting to be winter here, and there’s a lawyer job available in Palau

If you find yourself flying All Nippon Airways this month, you can read my story about trying - and failing - to learn how to snowboard in Niseko, a very very snowy area near Sapporo. Yes, indeedy, I tried to snowboard, and tried the patience of my poor snowboard instructors.
this is a snowboarder in […]

The article I wrote about two fantastic Tokyo dog stores - Water Dog Garden and George, related to San Francisco’s George - is out in this month’s The Bark.
Among these stores’ big sellers are t-shirts and other dog clothes, by which I mean clothes for dogs to wear. I hadn’t seen a lot of […]

two new stories came out last week, both about the past:
one, in Preservation Online is about a couple of Rhode Island paranormal investigators named Tom D’Agostino and Arlene Nicholson. One day last June, Tom, Arlene, and I went to see the Nine Men’s Misery monument in Cumberland, Rhode Island - the monument marks the […]

My article about sharks came out in this month’s Asian Geographic. It’s about the crisis of extinction sharks are facing, and what some people - like Yao Ming - are doing about it.
You can’t see the whole article online - got to subscribe to the magazine for that - but I can give you […]

I was in glorious Tokyo last week working on stories for The Bark and Cathay Pacific’s inflight magazine.
Hard to come up with a short list of what I love about that city - is it the cats in denim jumpsuits? the friendly Elvis impersonators? the bonsai-theme bars up on the fifth floor of […]

(This story was first published in the August, 2005 issue of All Nippon’s inflight magazine. It was also published in the travel sections of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Next month, I think, it’s going to be published in GU Magazine.)

Dinner is surreal, as we might have expected – we are, […]