Welcome
I am a New York-based freelance journalist and interactive media specialist. My writing appears in publications such as The New York Times,Wired, Slate, Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle. As the principal of Predicate, I also consult for digital publishers.
| I write on culture, science and technology, with a special interest in the "ideas"—or, egghead!—beat. Here are some samples, both old and new. | This is my wet lab online. Don't hesitate to contact me. Or perhaps you'd like to know more about me? |
U. Tube [Boston Globe]
Reserve another laurel for Edward O. Wilson, the Pellegrino University Professor emeritus at Harvard, serial Pulitzer winner, and prominent intellectual: online celebrity. Forget Charlie Rose -- Wilson has Google for a soapbox. Amid the amateur-hour piffle of YouTube "talent" and skateboarding dogs, the famed botanist stands in bold relief, with more than 500 Google video search results to his credit: Interviews ranging far afield of TV shows to a spate of appearances on several Web-only video platforms such as Meaningoflife.tv, Bigthink.com, Fora.tv, and the online home of the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference.November 2, 2008 ▪ 10:44 AM ▪ 
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SnagFilms: Best Thing for Docs Since Netflix [NewTeeVee.com]
Last week’s splashy entry into the online video arena of SnagFilms, a widget platform for watching and sharing documentary films that’s being headed up by a troika of ex-AOL executives (Ted Leonsis, Steve Case, Miles Gilburne), did not escape widespread (and warm) notice. But in addition to signaling a fresh way of thinking about the online video space, SnagFilms offers up a business model that may represent the most notable advance in the documentary film industry since Netflix.July 25, 2008 ▪ 02:41 PM ▪
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Interview: Zenware [CBC Radio]
This spring a Slate story of mine sparked some interest online, at Buzzfeed and 43 Folders, which led to this radio interview for a program called Spark at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a former employer of mine. Haven't had the courage to check the finished product yet, but here goes.May 12, 2008 ▪ 12:23 AM ▪
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Microsoft's Shiny New Toy
[MIT Technology Review]
At last March's Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Monterey, CA, a summit that's been described as "Davos for the digerati," the calm-voiced software architect from Microsoft began his demonstration abruptly, navigating rapidly across a sea of images displayed on a large screen. Using Seadragon, a technology that enables smooth, speedy exploration of large sets of text and image data, he dove effortlessly into a 300-megapixel map, zooming in to reveal a date stamp from the Library of Congress in one corner. Then he turned to an image that looked like a bar code but was actually the complete text of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, zooming in until two crisp-edged typeset characters filled the screen, before breezily reverse-zooming back to the giant quilt of text and images.
February 24, 2008 ▪ 03:43 PM ▪
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The Tao of Screen [Slate]
If your computer desktop is anything like mine—and, brother, it is—you've paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded.February 10, 2008 ▪ 03:31 PM ▪
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The Starving Artist’s Revenge
[New York Observer]
That first solo exhibit, magazine contract or book advance—for creative types, there’s nothing so thrilling as the promise of artistic breakthrough. Ask friends in publishing, fashion and art, and they’re bound to confide that they’ve fantasized about sudden, liberating success. And for good reason. Among New York’s creative underclass, it’s part of an enticing, dogged hope: that a career-making moment will erase years of hardscrabble adversity on the slippery lower rungs of the culture industry. Yet daydreams of creative triumph and financial reward are mostly just that: daydreams. So where is the guide to surviving, let alone accepting, the ongoing struggle of living the creative life?
December 5, 2007 ▪ 07:24 AM ▪
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Oliver Sacks' 'Musicophilia':
Music is Cure and Curse
[San Francisco Chronicle]
Who is the most important person in your local hospital? Seek - or, rather, listen - and ye shall find, according to Oliver Sacks.
Leading a documentary crew through his Bronx psychiatric hospital posting in 1973, as the distinguished psychiatrist-author recalls in his new study, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain," the film's director declared, "Can I meet the music therapist? She seems to be the most important person around here."
November 5, 2007 ▪ 11:14 AM ▪
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Q&A with Lewis Lapham
[Boston Globe]
MACHIAVELLI PREDICTED THE Blackwater debacle. The Qing dynasty's homeland security experts knew Great Walls make for great neighbors. Riding the rails was safer in Joseph Conrad's, not today's, Congo.
Few literary heavyweights cast their wit about like Lewis Lapham, 72, and fewer still are capable of publishing an independent historical journal that wears its anachronisms so gleefully. The journalism legend and erstwhile Harper's editor is launching a new print journal, Lapham's Quarterly, that will be available at major bookstores on Nov. 13.
November 4, 2007 ▪ 08:03 AM ▪
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Literary Death Match [Unpublished]
"Judging you is like egging a convent," observed New Yorker editor Ben Greenman of one contestant, shortly before the flinging commenced at last night's Literary Death Match at The Kitchen.October 29, 2007 ▪ 08:47 AM ▪
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A Valentine to Science, a Primer for Adults [Globe & Mail Books]
'Science is huge," explains Natalie Angier, "a great ocean of human experience; it's the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you'll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won't let you forget it." So begins the charming high dive act of Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science , the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer's playful riposte to our day's popular indifference to the wages of the scientific enterprise. The book, a conversational survey of the fundamentals of the hard sciences (physics, geology, chemistry, astronomy, biology), also limns world-shifting discoveries from each (like DNA, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and natural selection) and sketches its colourful, white-coated natives. Smartly foregoing snobbery, defensiveness and scare tactics -- oh, well, the "average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon" -- Angier takes her subject into a full-bodied embrace. Her egghead croon to science's virtues lends The Canon an unexpectedly appealing emotional tilt.June 4, 2007 ▪ 11:49 AM ▪
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