Archive for the ‘The Wide World’ Category
A collection [On National Geographic love, and deciding what to keep]
Since I began subscribing to National Geographic in 2004, as a sophomore in high school, I have only paid for the issues that I get via my membership to the Society. But I acquired an enormous collection, every additional one having been gifted to me. That meant that a good friend would find a singular [...]
May 8th, 201210 books everyone should read
(in my opinion) I was excited to get a request from my friend Andres, for a list of my “10 books everyone should read,” because it forced me (non-reluctantly) back to my bookshelf to see which books have had the biggest impact on the way I view the world. That is my criteria. Because while [...]
April 30th, 2012Gerardmer, France [2005]
Between visits to Paris and Colmar, we spent our remaining days in France in the tiny town of Gerardmer, about two or three hours east of Paris, where West Laurens High School’s sister school was located. I loved the scenery here, because it was all accessible with a nice walk, and was not nearly big [...]
March 4th, 2012My life is richer, simply because I asked
Subtitle: An oral history project, incredible families, much talk on adoption, China, love, and family, and how I found a title for this project Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a [...]
February 29th, 2012A new Chernobyl
Photographer David Guttenfelder recently won a World Press Photo Award for his work, for National Geographic, on the deserted town of Namie, Japan–which lies within a 12-mile radius of the site of last year’s nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. His photographs were some of the most stark and significant images I had seen [...]
February 22nd, 2012A day in Colmar [October 2005]
Colmar, France is one of the most amazing and charming little cities I’ve ever been to. I was a freshly-minted eighteen-year-old, and it was my first stint outside the United States. It was a liberating day for me, when we visited this French town on the German border, because I broke away from the group after [...]
February 20th, 2012Where the Quilt is kept
Inside the NAMES Project Foundation headquarters, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt is stored: This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as [...]
January 31st, 2012Visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt
The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space. What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering [...]
January 23rd, 2012But time makes you older
At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The [...]
January 21st, 2012Cities. And earth. And living rooms in Seoul.
“It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped.” This series of photos accompanies the article I mention here, on urban living and the future of the planet. They are photographs of families in Seoul, South Korea, in their identical [...]
January 13th, 2012