June 2012
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The Truth About Love
I first felt it last Wednesday afternoon, during our home visit to the village of a St Jude’s student.
Shy, yet grounded, the girl instructed the bus driver to her house, weaving the bus through unpaved, dirt roads, left and right at seemingly impossible corners. She was taking us through the slums. When we arrived at the house, a quasi-structure of mud, plaster, wood beams, a brown door frame and...
May 2012
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Mango
It was around lunchtime in Arusha when a man approached me over my right shoulder. First, I noticed the half-eaten, hastily mangled mango in his hand. Then the mango bits strewn across his upper lip, just sitting there as if on purpose, the juice smeared across his chapped mouth, pouring down his chin. Then I looked at his shoes, brown and moldy, with holes littered near the toes, sans socks. Next...
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About my first week in Tanzania
My job in Africa is to tell stories, specifically one story, and this is about the School of St Jude. It’s about how ten years ago an Australian woman named Gemma Sisia started a school in Arusha, Tanzania on a single plot of land teaching a handful of local kids, and how ten years later she has transformed her vision into reality, a reality so in your face, so ingrained within the fabric of this...
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“And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured...”
– The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Hemingway.
See you in Tanzania.
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Tanzania
For the next year or so, I’ll be in Tanzania, Africa to handle media relations for The School of St Jude, an emerging institution on the outskirts of Arusha that - for the past 10 years - has provided a free education to the poorest, brightest kids in the region. The town of Arusha is a tourist hotspot because of its proximity to Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti, where adventure junkies...
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Next Adventure
If you’re into lions, gazelles and third world diseases (oh my!), you’re in luck. I’m going to Tanzania for the next year.
Oh, so plenty more to come…
April 2012
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“Early that morning, Sundararajan stood up, looked around the room at his...”
– The Secret of the Temple, in this week’s New Yorker.
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March 2012
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“After Rhiannon disappeared and before Norm arrived, Zell took care of Julian....”
– This is such a sad story. David Epstein on Rhiannon Hull.
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“Bookstores are thin places, too, and, for me, none is thinner than Powell’s in...”
– Eric Weiner describing Powell’s bookstore in Portland as a “thin place.” I wholeheartedly agree - Powell’s is fantastic.
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Reporter who created “We Are Journalists” Tumblr... →
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“Soon after, Anthony stopped and leaned against a large boulder, and unlike the...”
– Tyler Hicks absolutely tearful account of his last reporting trip in Syria with Anthony Shadid, who died in front of him. This is one of the more tragic things I have read in a while.
February 2012
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“At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon...”
– This obit of John Fairfax is one of the most absurd, enthralling and encouraging stories I have ever read.
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“The Hotel Workers Union, under the leadership of Peter Ward, has created a...”
– FYI for all the freelancers in New York City worrying about health insurance. This might be something for you to keep an eye on, via Council Speaker Quinn’s State of the City address today. She’s beginning to lay the groundwork for her Mayoral run in 2013.
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Happy Birthday, Gay Talese →
longformorg:
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out...
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January 2012
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“Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a...”
– Bill Bryson isn’t a particularly deep read, but, more often than not, he’s on point when he waxes poetically like this. From neither here nor there.
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“Because … what the hell has Kim Kardashian ever done besides the X-rated...”
– Jack McCallum leading off Scorecard in this week’s Sports Illustrated. He absolutely obliterates reality TV culture. Fantastic.