by Michael Shapiro | Dec 7, 2021 | Blog, Environment, Stories
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...
by Admin | Aug 5, 2022 | Blog, Featured, Stories, Travel
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...
by Admin | Jul 5, 2024 | Featured, Stories, Travel
My editors at National Geographic made it clear to me that they did not want a personal reminiscence about Jan Morris after she died on November 20, 2020. They wanted a piece about Jan’s deep and abiding connection to her adopted home, Wales. She was half Welsh and...
by Michael Shapiro | Feb 9, 2022 | Blog, Interviews, Music, Stories
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...
by Admin | Feb 5, 2021 | Stories
This essay began forming as I took long walks in April 2020, after being diagnosed with Covid the month before. I focused on the silver linings of the pandemic and how this terrible wave of disease might lead to a more humane future. Here’s an excerpt: This month of...
by Admin | Feb 5, 2021 | Stories
I first heard Sarah McLachlan’s voice in 1990. I was teaching at an outdoor education school in the Santa Cruz Mountains and my housemate had a cassette tape of her first album. It was love at first blush. Her work was raw then; it wasn’t until four years later, when...
