One expat eyes another, 100 years in the past

Immersing myself in the late 19th and early 20th century life of a bourgeois Jewish woman in San Francisco might seem like a strange thing to do while living in Istanbul, but I jumped on the chance to investigate little-known writer Harriet Lane Levy for California magazine.

Though at first I found it hard to relate to the cloistered childhood she depicts in her autobiography, I became fascinated by how someone who grew up in such a small, closed-off world could make the leap to a larger one -- and eventually saw some similarities to my having caught the travel bug so badly when no one else in my family even has a passport. My expatriate life is pretty different than what we know of Levy's -- more cheap beers with fellow journalists in dive bars and fewer swanky soirees in famous artists' ateliers, and, of course, no family wealth to live off -- but the journey into the past provided worthwhile insights.

My article on Levy appears in the Summer 2010 issue of California, part of the theme of "Shelf Life."

Boing!

A photo gallery I put together for TreeHugger got linked on the popular tech site Boing Boing yesterday. Photographer Mary Taffe was great to work with and her abstract images of pollution in the lake near her Minnesota home are both artistically striking and very sobering.

It's always gratifying to be able to help call attention to the local environmental battles that people are fighting across the world. Having that coverage get attention from my blogging peers is a nice bonus.

Istanbul in an Urban Age

For someone who loves cities like I do, it was nothing short of fascinating to spend two days listening to the big thinkers -- architects, planners, academics, and activists from around the world -- that Urban Age brought to Istanbul this past week for the ninth in its series of globe-trotting conferences on the future of the planet's mega-cities.

(The stunning, Bosphorus-side setting at the Esma Sultan Yalısı, a thoroughly modern interior re-imagining of a gorgeous wreck of an old mansion into an airy event center, didn't hurt -- nor did the decadent amount of tasty food served.)

The event also marked my writing debut for the local English-language newspaper the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, for which I filed two stories, an overview of the conference ("The future of cities in an Urban Age") and a look at some imaginative architects' ideas for re-envisioning parts of our often chaotic and under-planned city ("New design visions for Istanbul neighborhoods").

The cost of 'virtual water'

A presentation by Arjen Y. Hoekstra of the Water Footprint Network was one of the most interesting I heard at the World Water Forum this spring, prompting all sorts of questions about water footprints vs. carbon footprints and when it might not be best to produce goods locally -- subjects that I could barely give a glancing look in a short news piece for the latest issue of Sierra. Working on it certainly piqued my interest in the topic further; hope it does the same for readers.

Underground adventures

Writing a short travel piece for the May/June 2009 Sierra about a trip I took some time ago to New Zealand brought back great memories. It's a long flight, of course, but well worth it for the amazing scenery, fantastic food and drink, and potential for adventure.

Where else can you hike across an active volcano, kayak secluded coastlines, and go inner-tubing in caves filled with glow worms? And we didn't even get far enough south to hit the glaciers.

World Water Forum in Istanbul

I spent the past week at the 5th World Water Forum, held here in Istanbul this year, attending sessions on traditional cultural uses of water, migration and conflict, and women's issues, among other topics that jumped out from the thick catalog of panels and presentations.

It was a productive week, as I filed daily dispatches from the conference for TreeHugger.com and wrote my first piece for The National, an excellent English-language newspaper based in Abu Dhabi.

Now 'tweeting'...

Count me among those who don't know exactly what the Twitter fuss is all about, but I've been hopping on Web bandwagons since 1996, so I'm not going to miss the chance to try and post some amusing observations and thought-provoking articles in 140 characters or less... Don't worry, I'll go light on what I ate for lunch.