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'American Futures': How Maps Work
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more The second installment in our American Futures report is up now, on its own special channel. The point of this one is to give some illustrations...
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'Weekend All Things Considered': A Grateful Farewell
I've never worked for National Public Radio, but over the years I have enjoyed and highly valued being part of programs there. Through the 1980s and 1990s I did regular commentaries -- first from Japan...
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American Futures: Where Should We Go?
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more As mentioned in introductory installments #1 and #2, this month my wife and I are kicking off an open-ended exploration of smaller-town America....
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State of Play on Travel Suggestions
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more This morning I posted a form, conveniently re-offered at the bottom of this item, soliciting suggestions for cities we should consider for our...
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One Low-Cost Safeguard While Living in 'Toxic' China
In Sunday's NYT, correspondent Edward Wong in Beijing has a powerful essay on the realities of living in a country where you are afraid to breathe the air. What he reports rings depressingly true to...
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'American Futures' Site-Suggestion Update
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more Yesterday morning I put up a form to receive suggestions for smallish towns we should visit on our upcoming American Futures road-trip-by-air. The...
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Why the Sale of the Washington Post Seems So Significant
In the photo above we see Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee walking out of the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington after their historic win in the legal battle over publishing the Pentagon Papers....
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Hey NYT, What Is It With You and These 'Near Disaster in the Air' Stories?
C'mon, New York Times, I just got done writing an item about your ever-growing preeminence in world journalism. And you do ... this again? Visitors to this site may recall the flap over a bogus NYT...
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American Futures Takes Off
Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg Greetings from Holland, Michigan, where our long-announced American Futures project is making its debut. That was the scene yesterday mid-afternoon at Montgomery County...
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On the Latest Bogus NYT Plane-in-Peril Story
Yesterday I mentioned that yet another NYT story on a brush-with-danger aboard an airliner was suspicious. Let me rephrase that: The story the imperiled traveler told is phony, and America's best...
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Mapping Your 'American Futures' Suggestions
I've put up a new post on our special American Futures project page, mapping the locations of the 600 smaller cities that readers have written in to recommend for a visit.* Reinvention and resilience...
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The Odd Fallibilities of Flight Aware
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more At our American Futures special-report site, you'll find a new post explaining the difference between the flight-plan map you see above, and the...
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'Heat Map' for American Futures
I've put up a new post on our special project site, with a live version of the popularity map shown below. This tabulates the suggestions we've received about small cities to visit -- weighted by...
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This Week's Aerial-Themed News of the Weird
While gathering material for descriptive posts on Holland, Michigan, here are several items catching up on recent aerial themes. 1) Great moments in corporate branding. A friend traveling in China...
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Welcome to Holland
Before I get to the end of this post, I'll explain why the image you see here is not the way the people of Holland, Michigan, would like their town to be understood. Yet it's part of a whimsical...
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Holland and the Theory of Serial Reportage
I remember this so clearly from traveling around rural China: When you're in a location you're trying to learn about, the highest-and-best use of each waking hour is to travel around, look at things,...
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What ARE Those Weirdo Midwestern Pond-Pools? And Other Aerial Arcana
1) Oddball Pool-Ponds. Recently I mentioned one of the "America, land of surprises" aspects of a cross-country trip by air. These, above, were a sample of the pool-ponds we saw across Ohio, in this...
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5 Items Worth Looking At
Some of these are old, but they were new to me and perhaps might have escaped your notice too. 1) Felix Salmon on Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. This came out a week ago, but for me rang exactly...
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American Futures Update: 2 American Reminders
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more I have put up a new item on our Atlantic-Marketplace-Esri special "geoblog" site, about our recently launched road-trip-by-air. It deals in a...
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'Tipping Is Good,' or So a Reader Claims
This morning I mentioned (approvingly) a recent Quartz story arguing that a tipping culture, in addition to being demeaning, didn't even accomplish its supposed end of producing better service. A...
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