this is recent

These are pieces I've published in the past couple of months:

Freunde von Freunden / Cass Calder Smith
On the way to work today, I was listening to an interview with the writer Jeanne Marie-Laskas, and she talked about an early profile she did of Tom Cruise, when he was filming Days of Thunder. She only vaguely knew who Tom Cruise was at the time, but because she didn't know much about him, she was able to ask the questions that mattered, the questions about who he was and not about the tangential things that surrounded him. She explained that if you're talking to a football player and you don't know anything about football, you're not going to ask about stats and games and strategies, which is all a kind of noise anyway. This is how I felt about interviewing Cass on his rooftop in Telegraph Hill. I didn't know anything about him beforehand, and I don't know much about architecture either, but the more I talked to him, the more I realized that the most interesting parts of his story were not the things that he built, but the relationships that formed him and the places he had lived--like a commune in Woodside, and Studio 54-era New York City. I loved hearing him talk about his father, Howard Smith, who was a journalist and radio personality. Cass compiled over 100 of these interviews into The Smith Tapes.

Reality SF blog / "Wisdom: Our Bodies"
One of the most memorable affirmations I have ever received came from my friend Jasper, who replied to my New Years' letter saying,"I wonder if maybe yours is less an artistic temperament than a mystical one" -- and I do believe that I feel most alive when I'm writing about matters of the soul, matters of spiritual mystery, making sense of who I am by investigating not just tangible things but their resonances and rhythms. I've arrived at a place where I can talk about my struggles with my body without shame -- those bodily struggles are more than bodily struggles. They are a reflection of the psyche and the soul, and so, at some level, when I talk about the body I am talking about much more, but the body is a place to start.

The Slope / "The Art of Wandering"
Wandering. Most of the time, it feels like I am wandering, which means I do not know what direction I am going. A lot of times it means I don't even know where I am, or where my mind is, or what my heart wants exactly, so Hall Newbegin's talk about wandering made sense to me, not just as applying to entrepreneurship, but as it applies to living through moments of everyday.