Rafael Coronel was Diego Rivera’s brother-in-law, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about him in Zacatecas. When the city renovated a former monastery from the 1500’s, Rafael donated his mask collection as… Continue reading
The sky immediately soothed me. We’d landed in Zacatecas as evening came on, and the airborne vista’s agricultural monotony had caused some slight trepidation, but on the short drive to town I was immersed… Continue reading
On Tuesday I realized I had an empty week. My next gig-job doesn’t start for a bit, the other one I applied for hasn’t gotten back to me yet, and real work has… Continue reading
I have a New Year’s tradition. Always fun, it’s grown even more important over the past three years. When the calendar flips, I look up lists of Things That Went Right that year.… Continue reading
Lamu is too small to be called a town, but too active (and interesting) to feel like a village. It’s not part of Kenya’s steel-and-concrete economic ambition, but nor does it show any… Continue reading
The two older gentlemen, both volunteer poll workers, could have been best friends. Robert Duvall (at his crankiest) and Clint Eastwood (at his beardiest) could have been Oscar contenders in this heartwarming tale… Continue reading
Someone in the train station spoke enough English to get us around the cities of China, but this was the countryside, just across the border into Tibet, and we’d signed up for a… Continue reading
Turkeys, football, and construction paper imitations of pilgrim shoes and Indian headdresses, that’s where childhood’s Thanksgiving began. Oh childhood. Oh 1980s. Then I learned about genetically modified turkeys that can’t reproduce naturally,… Continue reading
One of the things I most love about meeting people is hearing about all the niches I unconsciously knew existed but had never thought about before. That decorating the interiors of boats is… Continue reading
People would cut in front of us in barely civilized anarchy, especially on the subway, where someone said they physically push you in like sardines. That was one of the prominent things I’d… Continue reading
