Eric and I were traveling in Japan over the 2018/2019 holidays and we decided to spend a few days in Naoshima, an island in the Seto Sea famous for its many museums and art instillations. Eric and I went into an instillation, Backside of the Moon, by the artist James Turrell and the piece absolutely blew me away. Spoiler alert here: I am about to describe he piece, so if you…
Last night I was in bed in my Manhattan loft fuming — the neighbors had lit an illegal fire, in a condemned chimney, and smoke was pouring into my apartment. For me, this type of situation is my worst fear, a reflection of my greatest sense of injustice; people being inconsiderate and breaking the rules, resulting in an affront to my personal safety. This situation felt particularly affronting because it…
It was November 2018 and I had managed, by coincidence, to escape smoke from the fires raging in Northern California by a single day. My flight back to New York from an important event I had been working out in San Francisco departed early in the morning, by afternoon fires had created all kinds of delays and cancelations. Smoke filled the skies of San Francisco, air quality went to the…
I had been reading an article about how precarious life is for people living in rural China who were not issued government identification cards. Without the ids, they struggled to find work, they were unable to travel or to access medical care, education or state aid. It sort of shocked me that something so small — an id card — can make the difference between a life of ease and…
Eric and I were watching one of those reality home building shows today; a couple had worked hard, had long and successful careers, and were now building their dream home, on their dream plot of land. Only the land they chose was the top of a cliff, overhanging the ocean, with sandy earth that was sliding away. When the engineer came to make a first assessment, he told them the…