As a teenager, I awoke every Friday morning at 7am to the shattering sound of our next-door neighbor’s leaf blowers, robbing me of those last precious moments of sleep before school started. I’ve long despised these unnecessary machines for their...
In October, 2018, my wife and I joined a group of trekkers led by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 was the first person (along with Ed Hillary) to reach the top of Mount Everest. For our trek in the Kingdom of Mustang, which borders...
After a decade of honing his craft and playing gritty clubs, Robert Cray burst onto the blues scene in the mid-1980s and became a global sensation. None other than B.B. King anointed him as the great blues hope who could carry the torch to the next generation. Cray...
Travel writer and photographer Michael Shapiro takes you from Ireland to Guatemala, from Kenya to Ecuador, and talks about how meeting people all over the world helps build bridges and shatter expectations. This talk was given at the 2017 Sonoma County TEDx event in...
Back in 2008, I received a dream assignment from a gorgeously designed magazine called Lexus that’s read by more than 1 million Lexus drivers in North America. The editor asked if I’d spend a week in January playing baseball at San Francisco Giants fantasy...
In November 2018, my mom saw a story in Art News about the first true Pieter Bruegel the Elder exhibtion ever, to be held at the Kunsthistoriches art museum in Vienna. She asked if I wanted to make a trip to Austria and I said I’d love to but had a book deadline...
