Most editors don’t mind if you write a bit longer than assigned. I was asked to write 900 to 1,000 words about Old Crow Medicine Show for The Press Democrat, so it would have been fine, for example, to submit 1,100 words. Yet my interview with bandleader Ketch...
As I prepared to interview Fran Lebowitz, my friend and colleague Tim Cahill told me that she’d appeared on the cover of Outside magazine. This surprised me so I did a bit of digging and ended up writing this sidebar to accompany my story — click here for...
I may not have chosen a lucrative career but there’s no one better than Peter Coyote to help me see that there are far more valuable riches than money. Bottom line: I didn’t earn much for this story but got to spend nearly three hours with Peter at his...
In 2021, a colleague asked if I’d like to interview Goodall about her Trees for Jane initiative and I leapt at the chance. The best part of this interview may have been hearing about a tree Jane loved when she was a child. She spoke to me from the home her family has...
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...