Two worlds collided when I passed the Petra Food Mart on Youngstown’s north side yesterday. This little mini mart sits among urban squalor where locals stock up on beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets. Weeds poke up through the asphalt, and the red paint is peeling from the roofs. But the sign shows the proud facade …
Some photos from my hike yesterday at Enchanted Rock, with my friend Melodie. I used to come here a lot when I was in grad school in Austin. It’s about 17 miles from Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country. We found the prickly pears in full bloom.
In the Texas Hill Country near Kerrville and Bandera, it’s not uncommon to see peculiar fauna behind fences near the highways. Various ranches here keep exotic game for sport or meat: bison, gazelles, emus and ostriches. But yesterday, I drove past a sculpture that caught my eye, and it’s of an animal I’d seen aplenty …
A couple of summers ago, I helped a young filmmaker in the final weeks of edit on a film about her life. Socheata Poeuv was born in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and lived almost all her life in Texas with her parents, two sisters and a brother. But one Christmas she learned some …
A couple of people I know worked on a multi-part series that premieres on PBS this week. It’s called Carrier, and production crews spent six months on the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2005. The editing took two years to complete. Judging from the first two hours …
A tiger near my apartment in Palmer Square, Princeton. My office (the window on the top left) in the attic of the Joseph Henry House. Built in 1837 for the eponymous physicist who was lured to Princeton with a $1000 annual salary and the promise of his own home, the house was constructed to Henry’s …
“Have you ever taken pictures of this before?” the security guard asked me just after I pressed the shutter for a photo of this sculpture on the Princeton campus. “Just one wide shot a few weeks back when it was snowing,” I said. “Why do you ask?” “Have you seen the nose?” “Uh, no.” “Follow …
Today, while importing some other photos I took at Princeton’s campus this morning, I discovered this photo of the owl you met the other day. Here he is, flying away from me and my camera.
I am convinced that my hearing is worse after a year of living in Cairo, and I always thought the decibel level in the city is unhealthy. New York Times bureau chief Michael Slackman has a story in today’s paper that confirms my suspicions. He quotes an engineer named Mustafa el Sayyid, who helped carry …