From Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, a terrific, unorthodox new biography by Douglas Coupland: [S]omewhere around 2003 the texture of daily life inside Western media-driven societies began to morph, and quickly, to the point where, a half-decade later, it’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth century that time [...]

While out surfing today, I chatted with a guy who’d been given a GoPro HD Hero video camera for Christmas. He’d mounted it on the nose of his board, and every time he paddled for a wave, he reached out and flipped it on. “I’m going to Kauai this summer, and I just hope it [...]

I love This American Life, so I was happy to come across video of its brilliant host talking about storytelling. In the first of four videos, Glass describes the building blocks of stories for radio and TV. In the other three short videos — you can click from one to the next — he discusses [...]

I love this image, and these ghostly monks, taken at a Bangkok train station. (Photo by The Wandering Angel via Flickr, Creative Commons.)

Love this, from a collection of passages from writers on writing: I construct sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm [...]

It’s not perfect, but for travel, surfing and climbing inspiration, 180 Degrees South is a great ride. 180º SOUTH Trailer from Woodshed Films on Vimeo.

I’m so sorry to hear about the death of Denis Dutton. The writer, philosopher and academic founded one of my favorite websites, Arts & Letters Daily, which links to thoughtful and challenging writing, much of it long-form. (The New Yorker just dubbed him “the intellectual’s Matt Drudge.”) I occasionally exchanged emails with Dutton when he [...]

I snapped this while riding my bike today in Manhattan Beach.

I like the way former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic puts it in this interview: Prose is like walking to the store to buy a holiday ham; poetry is like standing on the corner and whistling. It’s a difference between wanting to tell a story or express a series of ideas, and wanting to speak [...]