I took a book called “Wild Stories” with me on our trip to Italy, and read this passage called “Creatures of the Dictator,” by Rick Bass. “The reason there are now so many grizzlies in Romania—back in the 1940s, for example, there were only about nine hundred—is that Ceausescu liked […]

Waiting and waiting here in this computer shop in Passo Sant’Angelo, Italy, for our emails to come up. Is this what is used to be like back in the dial-up era? We can’t believe how annoying this is…wow. When I think that most of the world’s internet is this slow, […]

Las Vegas’ tourism commission is fighting to keep its slogan from being hijacked. But with licensing rights worth potentially millions of dollars on the line, the clothing company is fighting back in court, arguing that Las Vegas is hardly the first place in the world where people have promised to […]

Up early, as tonight we fly to Rome with Nat and Val to spend a week at our rented hilltop house in the Le Marche region, near the Adriatic coast. We arrive in Rome at 7 am, then we drive the width of the country across mountains to our house. […]

Chris Graythen is the AP photographer mentioned earlier with the ‘loot vs. find’ caption. He wearily replied to the hundreds of emails pouring in from readers on sportsshooter.com. “I wrote the caption about the two people who ‘found’ the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find […]

Kelly Westhoff from Plymouth, MN is the winner of our 2nd $500 Travel Grant.  

Last night we drove out to Great Barrington and had chicken mole on the porch of a Mexican restaurant with an unpronounceable name as the rain pelted down all around us. Then it was on to business: Kent, Lisa, Cindy and I were meeting to read and judge another stack […]

Jim Hoagland writes in his syndicated column today about why France lost the bid to host the Olympics to London. “The well prepared systematic French bid to persuade delegates to award the games to Paris after Beijing hosts them in 2008 was thwarted by a politically motivated last minute swing […]

Boing Boing.net showed two photos of people waist deep in water, one was a black person the other two whites. In each, a person appears to be dragging a bag or box or two of food or beverages. The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo […]

Nicholas Negroponte has a mission. It’s to outfit the third world with $100 laptops to get everybody surfing and to put the power of the internet into the hands of the poor. Men’s Journal included a story by Paul Hochman about this endeavor. “Despite its low price, the computer is […]

Reading through Men’s Journal on the way to Boston in the car. Came across an amazing photo of a boat with the engine facing the wrong way. Volvo-Penta has come up with a revolutionary way to improve fuel efficiency, by facing the prop ‘backwards.” Accelleration is increased 15%, top speed […]