Journalism

This guy is pretty awesome. Mooney, a 40-year-old community outreach and public affairs officer at BrooklynÕs ASA Institute of Business and Computer Technology, intends to singlehandedly row across the AtlanticÑfrom GorŽe (an island town that is part of the West African country of Senegal) to Bahia, Brazil, and then up through the Caribbean and along the U.S. East Coast to his home in New York. The 8,000-mile GorŽe ChallengeÑduring which Mooney will make short stops to deliver HIV awareness and…

My Wired article can be read here.

Is the hed of my latest article for Wired, on page 48 of the Feb. 2005 issue. It’s about Toland Grinnell, an NYC artist. I just got back from Hartford, and had to take the real Chinese bus, and not the one I’d paid for, which had been cancelled. I was at the Hartford train/bus station and saw all these Chinese people scrambling into a van. About 15 minutes of broken English, $22, and a few hours later, I found…

By CYRUS FARIVAR If all goes well, this year a remote-controlled portable airplane will be taking to the air over Southern California, providing a low-cost eye in the sky for law enforcement. Chang Industry of La Verne, Calif., is one of dozens of companies working on portable unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, that can be equipped with cameras to transmit live video feeds to law enforcement officers on the ground, miles away. While larger and more sophisticated unmanned aircraft have…

December 16, 2004 WHAT’S NEXT When Shots Ring Out, a Listening Device Acts as Witness By CYRUS FARIVAR IN an unusual application of neuroscience research, police agencies around the country may soon be able to equip street corners with microphones and video cameras to fight gun-related crime. The system, based on work by Dr. Theodore Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, uses the equipment and a computer to recognize gunshots, pinpoint where…

The WashPost ran an article today about two Massachusetts soldiers who were killed in Iraq. Their funerals were attended by Sens. Kennedy and Kerry. But down on the second page, this paragraph jumped out at me: On Sept. 11, 2001, during the moments before the attacks on the World Trade Center, Gavriel had been on the phone with a friend working in one of the towers, according to the news stories. That made it clear: He would go to Iraq.…

Ed: Thanks again to Simon (via Denise) for the story tip! December 2, 2004 Using IPod Savvy to Mine a Niche By CYRUS FARIVAR THE signature white earbuds of the iPod seem to be sprouting everywhere. So inevitably, perhaps, a service industry is close behind. For those who lack the time or the know-how to transfer their record collections to their iPods, an entrepreneur has created a service that will do the trick. The service, HungryPod (hungrypod.com), converts CD’s to…

Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker) and Jonathan Schell (The Nation) spoke tonight at a panel discussion moderated by Bruce Shapiro (The Nation, Salon.com, Yale University). Apparently there you were supposed to register, but I didn’t know that until I arrived with a guy from my RW2 class that I met on the subway, who had registered for himself and another one of his classmates that he was with. When we arrived at the door, the people at the ticket table…

I was going to do a story on this new art installation at JFK for Wired News, but a quick Google search revealed it was shut down a month ago. Damn.

You do have a right to record an interview that I do with you, provided that I consent. Please don’t be like the folks at Promiscuous Bullet in their Oct. 29 podcast, where they broadcast their non-consenual recording of my interview with them. I wouldn’t have so much a problem with this if they’d asked me if they could record, and then asked me if they could podcast it. The interview doesn’t have anything bad, revealing or salacious in it,…