Jeremy HildrethAuthor Archives:
The backs of things
Steve Jobs gave an interview as part of a Smithsonian oral history project that’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever read, full stop. If you read this (along with the Playboy interview I’m about to mention), and you read between the lines, too, you’ll know what Steve Jobs knew. One of the things Steve [...]
Yes, sir! (No thanks.)
Is it because I’m from California? This could be the reason I prefer hotel and restaurant service that’s casual and friendly rather than obsequious and formal. A generous client treated me to a suite at the Fasano Las Piedras in Uruguay. I loved almost everything about this uber-posh resort in the hills above Punta del [...]
Heavenly puffs
I’m loving Mongolia. Yesterday I stood in a stockroom containing US$2 million worth of de-haired cashmere, combed, carded, teased and fluffy. It was taupe, and cream, and bursting the drawstring tops of stagecoach-ready sacks piled ceiling-high. I’d like to think it was destined to be knit into sweaters for gods and demigods. But I know [...]
Yo ho, a bi-continental life for me
San Salvador, Bahamas, a sandy coral cay that would meet the specs for Desert Island Discs, was the first land Chris Columbus sighted in the New World, on October 12, 1492. “I believe Japan is only a short distance to the west,” he wrote in his logbook. (Really.) Some 189,000 days later, I awoke at [...]
Keeping perspective on perspectives
There’s a great expression in American English: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is. It’s a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place [...]
Taking the waters: special places and the power of suggestion
There *is* something about old spa towns. Maybe it’s just the exaggerated power of suggestion induced by knowing that generations and legions of people have been drawn from far and wide to a particular place to have a particular experience. Druskininkai is in southeastern Lithuania, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, and people get [...]
Wandering enhanced: this is how I’m gonna roll from now on
Warsaw, Poland — I’m just capping off a 5-day solo ramble (more accelerated than an amble, you see) to Ukraine and Poland. I travelled with only a daypack and an iPhone 4, and it was the freest I’ve felt on the road in years. This is in spite of a tight schedule and a lot [...]
Distorted London: straightened out at last?
The London Tube “Map” (which is really a diagram, because of its gross geographic inaccuracies) is beloved. Even the normally hyper-rational Edward Tufte seems to approve of it. But I’ve always hated the damned thing, and seethed with resentment at the distorted view of London that’s been forced on me (and others) by its ubiquity. [...]
Burmese days: the road to Mandalay is paved by 8-year olds
Dispatch from Mangshi, China; Tue 4/2/02 9:16 AM; from the Heat Treatment ’02 series. Dear Friends, I never thought I’d say “Ahh, freedom,” upon crossing into Red China, but that’s exactly what I breathed to myself yesterday as we left Burma-slash-Myanmar after a whirlwind week in that repressed, impoverished, tarnished jewel of a country. Burma, wrote [...]
Jeremy’s Vilnius mini-guide
Lithuania used to be the largest country in Europe, stretching, under the rule of Grand Duke Vytautas in 1430, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea (a feat achieved, incidentally, not by conquest but by inclusiveness and diplomacy). Lithuania was also a Soviet Republic for half a century, and Vilnius, its capital, wears on [...]
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