Aside

The world has lost its most preeminent Estonian writer, Jaan Kross. Sadly, I don’t have the eesti keeles skills to have read him in his native language, but on my most recent trip to Eestimaa, I was happy to have been able to find a copy of Treading Air, which I’m currently reading now. I’m just a little bit into it — so I don’t have much to say about the novel just yet — but my fascination with all…

While it may not be as close and convenient and convivial as The Trappist — William Brand points to the recent opening of La Trappe, a new Belgian bar and restaurant in North Beach, across the Bay. This is definitely going to be my pre-Bimbo’s dining spot. 🙂

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on new WiFi devices will air on Morning Edition All Things Considered today! It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams). New York – 4 pm to 6:30 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 4 pm to 6 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 3:30 pm to 6:30 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3…

WSJ: The 1 a.m. brrrrrring from the alarm clock — no problem. “I’ve always loved working in the morning,” he said. “You’re waking up in Washington, D.C. You’re looking out the window and watching this sleeping giant wake up. And I’m right in the middle of it, starting people’s days with things they need to know.” The duality of his existence seems to please Mr. Kasell mightily — delivering the news and edifying listeners during the early part of the…

I just found this awesome Greasemonkey script, Autoprint 2.0, which automatically switches to the print version for a whole host of news websites.

NYT: After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe. Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in…

From Sarmad Ali’s new blog, Baghdad Life: I celebrated my first Christmas in 2004, after I had moved to the U.S. to attend Columbia University. One of my classmates, who became one of my best friends here, invited me first for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas. We went to Berkeley, Calif., where his grandparents lived. It was a welcome break from the hectic pace of New York, and it was nice to be with a family again, several months after…

Estonia and a whole host of other countries joined the expanded Schengen Zone today! >

No offense to Steve Lohr, but I’m not really sure what the point of his piece in today’s Times “Silicon Valley Shaped by Technology and Traffic” was. As far as I can tell, the main message is “geography matters.” Is this news to anyone, in late 2007? Really? Alan Wiig had a much more interesting comment on it than I ever would: Yeah, there is at a book about this from at least ten years ago. I dislike the analogy…

Wow. I just finished a very very very rough draft of the Iran section of my book. Yikes. This writing stuff is hard. It weighs in — with a few thousand words’ worth of holes — at about 22,000 words right now.