Passion Projects
Update November 10, 2025: David Szalay’s Flesh is the Booker Prize winner. Update November 9, 2025: Tomorrow the 2025 Booker Prize winner will be announced. I’ve never managed to finish the entire longlist prior to a winner being announced, largely […]
Danny’s eulogy. July 22, 2022. I’m often asked what it was like growing up with Danny. I could never quite figure out how to answer that. Growing up with Danny is all I knew. You may as well have asked […]
Wylie Burgess died on December 8, 2021. This is the eulogy I gave at his funeral. For the record, among our core group of friends, I was Wylie’s favorite. ** It turns out that Wylie admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I […]
It’s early March, I’m in New York City. Nobody’s wearing a mask yet. Oblivious or incredulous, we’re all standing shoulder to shoulder at stoplights, sitting knee to knee on subways, and you can see our breath. I’m up early preparing […]
This winter in Kuwait couldn’t have been more pleasant. I’ve walked along the beach almost every morning, watching the barges and battleships bob, watching fishermen reel in their catch against the mild ocean current, and watching stray cats watching too, […]
Note: In Kuwait, it’s illegal to have alcohol, pork or porn. Hopefully ‘food porn’ is exempt, or I’m about to get sent back to the U.S. on a disappointing technicality. It has been difficult to understand food shopping here in […]
I’m watching windsurfers carve the Persian Gulf on a bright Sunday afternoon. It’s been a blustery weekend, colder than normal, and there are even waves trying to bite the tidy ankles of the shoreline. The Plume Labs air quality reading […]
It’s impossible to say what Kuwait is like, having lived here three days. It seems exotic in the way new things always are. Even the driving, where everyone converges at once on a single lane, horns squealing like five-year-olds in […]
I’m moving to Kuwait. I typed that while flying there. It’s a simple flight, like going almost anywhere else. Dulles to Dubai, Dubai to Kuwait. If we weren’t stopping in Dubai for a night, we’d be there in a little […]
The redemption story arc begins with heartache and outrage and ends in a triumphant comeback, which is why it’s premature to pin the genre on a return of specialty-grade coffee in Haiti or the parallel personal turnaround of Joey Stazzone, […]