When the pandemic began, back in those flopsweat days of March 2020, I came to a horrible realization. Due to necessary quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and general social disruption, the human race was going to be forced into a state of collective and sudden Onlineness totally unprecedented in history. Billions
Apple's engineers have figured out how to design a robot lamp so adorable that everyone I've shown the video to says they'd die for it. By studying how to translate human expression into the movements of an outwardly-normal looking appliance, Apple's team
I'm back in the USA. I haven't been here since December 16th. I spent the last month in Sulawesi, and then spent a few more days in Jakarta and Singapore before boarding a flight back to California, where I'm staying with my parents for
I went to Thailand in March because I needed to get some work done. Bangkok is a pretty ideal place if you're looking for somewhere easy to hunker down for a while to grind away on projects, proposals, and emails. There's excellent public transportation, great and
As I write this, America's mad king Donald Trump continues his cruel and needless attacks on Canada, from asinine tariffs to batshit insane threats to make the country the USA's 51st state. Entirely understandably, Canadians are outraged by this act of betrayal from a formerly staunch
Taipei: Week One I spent my first eight nights in Taiwan at the Riviera Hotel, a nicely renovated, mid-century built place near the Yuanshan Taipei MRT Station, in a green and pleasant neighborhood that used to be home to a lot of American GIs during the period when the US
Hi, I'm in Taiwan. It has come to my attention that the world may be ending. Well, kind of. For some of us, in a sense. I can't begin to catalog the horrors here since January 20th: a lot of people are working on that (like
We live in the era of too much news, but even by those already-low standards, there's been too much goddamned news over the last two weeks. Every time I try to sit down and write one of these, something else happens. It's kind of been like
In the middle of this terrible month - a month made to shamble through, a month which must be endured - I received a far smaller piece of bad news. Simon's Rock, the weird little college for weird kids where I spent a weird year and a half,
For the last year and a half, us Bluesky users have frequently reminded one another that we are merely posters on a niche microblogging website. It's intended as a warning about hubris. A protective against the ever-present danger of poster's madness. A nerd-ass version of the
In the course of fending off my gnawing existential dread about the election, I found myself looking at Lord Horatio Nelson's toilet - hero of Trafalgar, icon of British naval power - wedged at a curious oblong angle into the constantly under-refurbishment hulk of the HMS Victory. And
It's officially fall in the Boston area, which I both enjoy on its own merits and also dread as it presages the arrival of winter. In any case, I'll be spending part of this month in the UK, where I'm traveling for a conference.
My latest from Foreign Policy is out, and it's about a disturbing global uptick in attacks on civilians with small, cheap drones. Please read and share. I've got some more time on my hands nowadays, and I'm planning to start updating this newsletter more
Crete is big, weird, and magnificent - a lengthy, arid slash of an island that humans have been occupying, conquering, and visiting since at least 7000 BCE, with a highly distinctive culture that is somehow both very Greek and highly unique to itself. While the mysterious and aesthetically-gifted Bronze-Age culture
It was Friday evening. I was trying to relax. And then all of a sudden, a dozen people sent me the same link. Drone news. Of course. Why does big-drone related news never seem to drop at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday? Anyway, I will briefly sketch my thoughts
There was once a time, long ago, when I thought I was going to grow up to be a travel writer. I was raised in a family where everyone both traveled a lot, and read stuff along the lines of Gerald Durrell, Jan Morris, and Patrick Leigh Fermor when they
A nightmarish airborne robot-eye, piloted by unknown and possibly unknowable forces operating from an undisclosed location in a secret command-center, lit only by blinking red LED lights. A far-flying remote controlled warplane designed by hubris-poisoned and dead-eyed engineers, hauling a payload of knife-throwing missiles to rain down on enemies of
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what have we learned from this year of watching Elon Musk repeatedly, endlessly fail?
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Some initial impressions from watching DJI and other drones in the air above Israel and Gaza
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What's the deal with me and drones? How did a journalist get into little flying camera robots? Here's my attempt to explain.
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Meta has failed at world domination so far, but Elon Musk has given them a hell of an assist.
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How Mark Zuckerberg's "pivot to video" made the world worse.
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In Southeast Asia in the early 2010s, I watched as Mark Zuckerberg's creation began to destroy Myanmar. Here's why I'm never using Threads.
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My latest for Foreign Policy, disaster feeds on Bluesky, and more.