by Michael Shapiro | May 1, 2006 | Blog, Featured, Interviews, Stories, Travel
Michael Shapiro first met Jan Morris in 1992 at a travel writing seminar near San Francisco. “When I first met Jan she seemed like a visitor from another time,” Shapiro says. He interviewed Morris in Llanystumdwy for his book A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers...
by Michael Shapiro | May 28, 2012 | Blog, Featured, Stories
I always thought if I ever floated down the Amazon it’d be in a dugout canoe on a shoestring adventure. But when the editor of a magazine for country club members asked me to join a luxe cruise, of course I went and had a fabulous time. The local guides were the...
by Michael Shapiro | May 6, 2012 | Blog, Interviews, Stories, Travel
After seeing what FLW did with the Guggenheim, I expected his desert home to be outrageous and astonishing. Of course it wasn’t – the low-slung building fit perfectly with their desert surroundings. Following is my story on the witty and enormously...
by Michael Shapiro | May 1, 2012 | Blog, Music, Stories
Usually when an actor takes the stage to play music it’s mediocre at best. But Hugh Laurie can really play piano and has assembled a top-shelf band from New Orleans. I profiled Laurie in advance of last Tuesday’s show in Napa, which was superb....
by Michael Shapiro | Mar 26, 2012 | Blog, Interviews, Stories
These days Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, the gossipy telephone operator who used to parody the AT&T monopoly, works for an insurance firm, “denying health care to everybody.” She told me this during a phone interview in March, 2012, for a Press Democrat...
by Michael Shapiro | Mar 3, 2012 | Blog, Books, Stories
Ballistics evidence suggests the bullets that killed NFL-player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman were fired from just 10 yards away. We know it was friendly fire — his mother believes it may not have been an accident. Here’s a review I wrote for the SF Chronicle...
