1 Who says science fiction is only set in the future? After a while, the story that looks least believable is the past. The console television with three channels. Black and white picture. Manual controls: the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven. You have to get up and walk somewhere to change…
1) On what travel can reveal about the way we live If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardor and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might…
By Robert D. Kaplan Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (an excerpt) Knowing the future is easy, if only we were willing to see the present. In the 1980s, it was one thing to learn about Afghanistan through fleeting and sporadic news reports; it was another to watch with a…
1) Allow healthy separation between you and the first draft A bit of separation between you and your script is healthy. After a few weeks, you might even forget every word that you wrote. That is a good thing. It’s important to look at your script with fresh eyes, as a new reader would. Reread…
Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafés. It was a time of general confusion Of being a body hurled at a wall. I…
1) On the way empathy requires inquiry and openness Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” 2) On the…
“The time-honored tradition of the flâneur is when the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it.” –Will Self, interviewed in World Hum “He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of…
(an excerpt) Why is so much travel writing so boring? Why on Monday morning do people talk about an op-ed piece they read in the Sunday paper, or a sports column, or a magazine essay, or a feature profile, but rarely a travel story? Why do the travel magazines, lavish with tips and sumptuous photographs,…
A “close reading” is a detailed examination of a text to study its design. The goal is to explore how an effective text works, and consider the decisions and strategies the author used in creating it. There is no rigid set of rules about how one must approach a close reading, but there are a…
I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. “Sit down and have a drink” he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. “You have SARDINES in it.” “Yes, it…
1) On the ubiquity of beauty Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 2) On the uses of simplicity It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if…
