Past Articles

Tired of playing second fiddle to men in conservative Saudi Arabia, five women decided if you can’t beat them, join them. Reuters reports today. “Al Watan newspaper said the five women underwent sex change surgery abroad over the past 12 months after they developed a “psychological complex” due to male […]

Jeff Taylor made a fortune by founding Monster.com. Now he’s got a new venture called Eons, for which he has raised $10 million. But nobody yet knows what the company will offer its target audience—people over age 50. Haiwatha Bray writes in today’s Boston Globe. “A Pew survey finds that […]

I’ve reached the end, finally, of a book I’ve been reading since October 2005. It was a lovely book, Paul Theroux’ “The Pillars of Hercules,” given to me by my fellow traveler Carla Waldemar, as we left Santiago. In one of the last scenes, the author visits another legendary writer, […]

Some friends came for a weekend visit to Cindy’s and they brought Friday’s Wall Street Journal. This fat paper is always full of good stuff, it’s hard to get through the whole thing. I found a funny item about the proliferation of food festivals, and how the rich are missing […]

Brad Shepard emailed me last week, recalling that I’d left him a voicemail. I left that message two months ago, but hey, I’m glad he called. Brad does the morning show on WHYN-AM 560, my favorite radio station. I’ll be chatting about the GoNOMAD Cafe on Monday morning at 8:05 […]

Richard Sandomir writes in the Times: “In the midst of Ed Bradley’s worshipful two-part profile of Tiger Woods on “60 Minutes” last Sunday, I wondered if it was an infomercial or if Woods had paid a fee for these adoring 25 minutes. With nothing new to report — and not […]

MTV writes about song choices on American Idol. “There’s style and song arrangement, both overseen by professionals hired by the show. Some have argued the importance of camera time, which is, of course, out of a contestant’s control. And there’s song selection, the one true strategic element in the “Idol” […]

A day of running around meeting with bookkeepers and signmakers…and when I got a moment, I sat in the window of the cafe and read the Republican. Buried deep way way back, in the sports section, was this important news for the environment. Two conservation groups will buy 218,000 acres […]

In a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, an almost unheard-of step for a Supreme Court justice, Justice Antonin Scalia said a reporter misinterpreted the gesture he made when she asked whether his participation in Sunday’s special Mass for lawyers might cause some people to question his impartiality […]

I went to the supermarket early this morning. On the way, I stopped by my cafe, and met a fellow business owner strolling down the sidewalk. “Come on in for a coffee,” I offered, but he didn’t break his stride. I spied him later carrying a to-go cup from the […]

I read the obituaries regularly. Some times one sticks out, like this one I saw today on Boston.com, titled “the Ultimate Mensch.” Sam Allis wrote about James O. Freedman, former president of Dartmouth, who died of cancer recently. “I first him met over a decade ago, when I covered education […]

I hit another WiFi coffeehouse today in Northampton, MA. I sat at a big table with five others, three of whom also typed into their laptops. But I couldn’t get a signal, so I had to write this and post it later. There was a story in the NY Times […]

What Eduardo Porter writes in today’s NY Times will disappoint many readers my age. He says that there will be much less money from our parents to inherit than we think. “While some forecasters still hope that the vast pool of wealth accumulated by the generations born in the first […]

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m typing at Rao’s Coffee a big coffeehouse in Amherst. I am seeing how these guys do it, so I can bring back some wisdom to my own little cafe. Last night I spoke cordially with an old nemesis: it felt great to be back in […]

Wendy Boswell is a genius who knows all about web stuff. Below is her advice on finding the “Deep Web,” with 500 times the amount of web pages catalogued by Google. “That’s one of the tricks you can use to find Invisible Web content – just put the word “database” […]

At the cafe, we buy all of the local papers, so today I browsed the Greenfield Recorder, and found a significant story about Wal-Mart. The headline ‘Wal-Mart Goes Organic,’ meant a tipping point will soon be reached. The stores are throwing their massive weight behind purchasing only wild-caught fish that […]

From the archives of Zinester, I found this interesting item about a new subscriber gift from a French magazine. Good Vibrations: When the December issue of Jalouse hit Paris newsstands Friday, it came polybagged with a gift that the publisher believes is a first in the industry: a silver-plated vibrator. […]

The interns who work with us a GoNOMAD are often quite successful when they leave us and move out of Amherst and into the real world. A few years ago, we had Amanda Denz as an intern. She was the best writer I’d seen of all the interns over the […]