It’s not too often that the central hero of a news story isn’t named, so I had to take note of what occurred in the realm of Kiribati politics last month. For much the year, the current president has been trying hard to deport an Australian-born judge—a man who just happens to be married to […]
When I parted ways with Twitter back in June, I did so with a post stating that I needed more time to focus on strengthening my parasocial relationships. This was only half in jest: I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time dialed into my headphones, listening to people chatter about great books, bad movies, […]
Tags:Abroad in Japan·Japan·podcasts
I’ll confess that I once had a dim view of ham radio due to The Simpsons, which never passed up an opportunity to lampoon shortwave operators as insular nerds. (There’s a full-list of animated references to ham radio here; few are flattering.) What changed my mind in recent years is my affection for this site, […]
One of the great (albeit infrequent) pleasures of my work is hearing from strangers who have personal connections to the stories I stitch together for a living. Such was the case with Christian Chavez, a Los Angeles City College student who contacted me via Twitter back in April. Christian said he was the grandson of […]
Tags:hijacking·journalism·Ricardo Chavez Ortiz·The Skies Belong to Us
One small way I’ve been dealing with the inflation crunch is by scooping up a larger percentage of my books from yard sales. This is how a well-worn copy of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool ended up in my possession; it was strongly recommended to me by a neighbor-turned-vendor, perhaps in part because the terrible film […]
Tags:fiction·literature·Nobody's Fool·novels·psychology·Richard Russo·self-destruction
There’s nothing particularly novel about the pickle in which I currently find myself. After gutting my way through some major projects this summer, with bewilderingly mixed results, I hit the proverbial wall around Labor Day. Daunted by the challenges of starting anything new, I instead chose to dither—you’d gasp if I told you how much […]
Tags:housekeeping·life·writing
Yes, still here, and still curious about those portions of the earth that are most unlike my own. Thus my recent interest in the goings on Heard Island, an uninhabited blob that can lay fair claim to the title “Remotest Place on the Planet.” It’s perhaps best known as the headquarters for the Heard Island […]
Cornell’s digital collection of persuasive maps has a lot to sift through, and a great deal of the material is guaranteed to raise eyebrows. (To the curators’ credit, they haven’t shied away from including malevolent propaganda from days of yore.) I’m partial to a bunch of the more lighthearted maps, such as this Greyhound promotional […]
I’d be pleased to make Microkhan about nothing more than fantastic patent art. My current favorite is the drawing above, take from the landmark 1971 patent for the modern dye pack. The inventors, Harold Robeson and Jerry Birchfield, acknowledge in their application that they were standing on the shoulders of giants: The first dye pack, […]
I’ve been revisiting some older movies as of late, in a so-far futile effort to convince Microkhan Jr. that cinema existed and flourished before, say, 2002. In doing so, I’ve become increasingly enamored with the wizardry of practical effects, which are often the product of a sort of technical genius I can scarcely comprehend. The […]
As part of a new routine designed to get me out of a creative rut, I’m aiming to start each weekday with a short post. Most will be culled from the mile-long list of bookmarks I’ve compiled over the years—an assemblage of arcane papers, defunct blogs, and curious news items that caught my fancy at […]
Tags:Czechoslovakia·manufacturing·North Korea·propaganda·psychology·Soviet Union
As is always the case, I had to cut a slew of choice details out of my latest Wired story—the bizarre and alarming tale of a Washington State clinical-trials company that (and this is the vastest of understatements) didn’t play by the industry’s rules. In a lot of instances, material got left on the cutting-room […]
One reason I generally shy away from celebrity biographies is that they typically involve too much authorial sleight-of-hand. Though they’re written in the first-person, it’s always obvious that the actor or athlete or entrepreneur behind the “I” didn’t actually commit any words to paper. Even the savviest ghostwriter can’t help but leave their fingerprints all […]
Tags:books·celebrities·Col. Sanders·fried chicken·KFC·medicine·writing
I’m not entirely sure why I chose today to re-open this blog after five-plus years of silence. Lord knows there have been many times when I’ve toyed with the idea of popping back up on these august pages, but I could never quite work up the gumption to do so. This morning, though, I realized […]
Last October, Wired was kind enough to publish a story I’d been working on for 16 months—the tale of a lonely Appalachian woman acted as a money mule for a crew of Nigerian con artists. That woman, Audrey Elaine Elrod, was lured into the conspiracy by a scammer who posed as a Scottish oil worker […]
Tags:crime·fraud·journalism·psychology·scams·West Virginia·Wired
Now that one year has elapsed since The Skies Belong to Us became available for mass consumption, a paperback edition of the book is hitting store shelves from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Gulf of Maine. To celebrate this blessed occasion, I’ve decided to offer some limited-edition goodies to the faithful: signed […]
Last November, my friend Matthew Power and I did a reading together at a crowded, cave-like East Village bar. I opened the proceedings with a couple of passages from my skyjacking book, accompanied by some vintage slides of early 1970s nuttiness—my typical presentation, which the crowd seemed to enjoy alright. Then Matt came up, obviously […]
Tags:Matthew Power
When the Indonesian government looks back upon its handling of Mount Kelud’s latest eruption, it may lament its failure to heed a clue from the animal kingdom. Two days before the volcano began to belch its noxious contents, the critters that inhabited its slopes seemed to know that something was up: “We received reports from […]
Tags:animals·deer·Indonesia·Mount Kelud·natural disasters·volcanos
While recently pondering the precise definition of the word “deadpan,” I felt compelled to look up a quote that stuck with me as a kid. It comes from Boris Loginov, the coach of the Soviet Union’s motoball team, on the eve of the 1986 Goodwill Games. He was evidently asked to defend his sport, which […]
Tags:motoball·Soviet Union·sports
From one of the best-titled anthropological papers of the past several decades, a brief account of one way in which Inuit shamanic gatherings could try the resolve of the easily amused: On the north shore of Hudson Strait, at Akuliaq, when the masked dancers, there called Ekko, appear “the people are not allowed to laugh […]
Tags:anthropology·Inuit·shamanism
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m spending a few days working and searching for the perfect shrimp burrito. I need to rush back home via red-eye on Wednesday night, though, in order to pull off a couple of The Skies Belong to Us events. I thought I’d take a moment to share the details of […]
Tags:BookCourt·Gregory D. Johnsen·New York Public Library·terrorism·The Skies Belong to Us
Only the most misguided soul would get into the writing game because he or she craves adulation. Plaudits and ego massages are hard to come by in the line of work, and I’m perfectly fine with that. But I’ll confess to feeling a small twinge of excitement upon learning that The Skies Belong to Us […]
Tags:Goodreads Choice Awards·Punky Brewster·The Skies Belong to Us
There’s no question that the Academy for Future Health seems like a rather nutty organization; if Google’s translation of its German-language philosophy is to be trusted, then the Academy apparently believes that the Vatican has ties to extraterrestrials, and that a bunch of elite financiers are hip to an approaching Doomsday. So when police in […]
Tags:Academy for Future Health·corruption·cults·Dominican Republic·Germany·law·police
Given the state’s reputation as a mecca for opioid absuers, you will probably not be surprised to learn that West Virginia leads the nation in drug-overdose deaths. Yet the problem evidently has less to do with the sheer number of narcotics consumed than with a dangerous (and nonsensical) quirk of law: The state doesn’t allow […]
A quick Google News search for the term “farm accident” is all that’s required to grasp the perils of working the land. Despite copious safety advances since the early days of the mechanized thresher, agriculture remains a dangerous profession in large part because its essential tasks are often performed by individuals; if something goes amiss, […]
Tags:agriculture·Australia·survival
The exploits of the various Indian sand mafias has long been a topic of fascination ’round these parts. As the subcontinent’s construction boom has lead to an escalation in sand prices, miners have become eager to accumulate the granular material by any means necessary. In practice, that means excavating any strip of land they wish, […]
Fact-checking Tasmania’s claim to be the roadkill capital of the world is no easy feat, since few of its potential competitors (we’re looking at you, Madagascar) keep accurate statistics regarding flattened wildlife. One thing that is certain, however, is that the remote Australian state is a tireless innovator in the roadkill space, dedicating vast resources […]
Contrary to what you may have concluded after several months of silence, I have not, in fact, abandoned this long-cherished experiment in storytelling. I had to shift Microkhan to the back burner during a long summer spent spreading the gospel of The Skies Belong to Us, an endeavor that took me to the far corners […]
I have honestly been taken aback by the reluctance of many folks to read The Skies Belong to Us while traveling. Time and again, I’ve heard from people who refuse to bring the book on planes, for fear of freaking out their seatmates—or, more important, those meddlesome TSA screeners. I’m sympathetic to these concerns, but […]
It’s a bit tough for me to believe that The Skies Belong to Us is finally out today. As dedicated followers of this project know, I’ve been working on the book for nearly four years, and there were many moments when its completion seemed an impossibility. The Grand Empress and the progeny can attest to […]
Tags:1970s·books·hijacking·skyjacking·The Skies Belong to Us·writing
