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 [...]

I’ve jumped a lot of waves in my windsurfing days, but I’ve never gotten air like this. A kitesurfer jumps a pier.

Fascinating interview conducted recently at UC Santa Barbara. Among the many highlights is Herzog’s response to an audience question about personal happiness (1:56:33). American culture has always held up happiness as among the greatest goals in life, but like Herzog, I think I’m more interested in a life that feels meaningful.

One of the pleasures of living in San Diego is being a short drive from the Mexican border, and while I found myself visiting Tijuana less frequently as the drug war escalated in recent years, I never gave it up entirely. In fact, I crossed over not too long ago to have lunch at Carnitas [...]

Terry Gross asked the host of The Daily Show about a typical day at the office. I loved his take on the importance of structure in allowing for creativity: To be able to weed through all this material and synthesize it and try to come up with things to do, we have a very kind [...]

I was on a flight home from Germany last week after speaking at the Society of American Travel Writers’ conference when the pilot made an announcement: We would be reversing course and flying more than an hour back to Iceland to drop off a sick passenger. The elderly man stood on his own before being [...]

Nice to see four World Hum stories included as notable selections in the new Best American Travel Writing anthology, just published. This year’s book was guest edited by Bill Buford, founder of Granta and author of the excellent memoir, “Heat.” The World Hum pieces honored in the book are: On the Perils of Travel Writing, [...]