A camp on the way up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. A good place for writing.
WRITING SAMPLES::
Climate change threatens Shishmaref, Alaska | CNN | December 3, 2009
[Note: This story was timed with the UN climate talks in Copenhagen]
Shishmaref, Alaska (CNN) — When the arctic winds howl and angry waves pummel the shore of this Inupiat Eskimo village, Shelton and Clara Kokeok fear that their house, already at the edge of the Earth, finally may plunge into the gray sea below.
“The land is going away,” said Shelton Kokeok, 65, whose home is on the tip of a bluff that’s been melting in part because of climate change. “I think it’s going to vanish one of these days.”
The Gulf’s silent environmental crisis | CNN | May 28, 2010
On the Gulf of Mexico (CNN) — Ten miles off the coast of Louisiana, where the air tastes like gasoline and the ocean looks like brownie batter, Louisiana State University professor Ed Overton leans out of a fishing boat and dunks a small jar beneath the surface of the oil-covered water.
“God, what a mess,” he says under his breath, scooping up a canister of the oil that’s been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.
Why drilling in ‘inner space’ tests human limits | CNN | July 2, 2010
Morgan City, Louisiana (CNN) — Behind each video feed of oil billowing out of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is a robot about the size of a minibus built at an industrial center in this Louisiana oil town.
With Foursquare’s founder, life’s a game | CNN | June 4, 2010
New York (CNN) — Dennis Crowley was jogging across a New York bridge when he spotted something exciting: a cartoon mushroom, spray-painted on the sidewalk.
It looked like something out of Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros.,” which Crowley grew up playing. He stomped on the mushroom as he ran by and had a sort of nerdy realization.
“I was like, s—!” he recalled. ” ‘I should get a power-up for that!’ “
Since that moment several years ago, Crowley — a 33-year-old who’s always in a sweatshirt and wears an eyebrow-length mop of Justin Bieber-like hair — has sought to turn adult life into a whimsical game. In his world, people should earn points and prizes for making random discoveries like that one.
The genius brothers behind Google Wave | CNN | October 27, 2010
(CNN) — Lars and Jens Rasmussen were broke and jobless — with only $16 between them — when they made it big in the Web world by selling their idea for Google Maps.
Years later, after finding cushy employment at Google Inc., the Rasmussen brothers flew in May from Sydney, Australia, to California where they would debut their sophomore product, a Web application called Google Wave, which they say, quite audaciously, will kill e-mail and forever change online communication.
But their lives didn’t depend on its success — not like before.
Last man standing at the wake for a toxic town | CNN | June 30, 2009
PICHER, Oklahoma (CNN) — Wearing powder blue pants and a plaid fedora, 84-year-old Orval “Hoppy” Ray arrived fashionably late to a celebration in Picher, Oklahoma, a vacated mining town at the center of one of the nation’s largest and most polluted toxic-waste sites.
Twilight at Tar Creek | The Oklahoman | October 15, 2006
[Note: This is part of a series for The Oklahoman on the prolonged death of Picher, Oklahoma, a lead mining town and Superfund Site. The coverage won the Society of Professional Journalists' regional First Amendment Award for an online project.]
… It’s Monday night at the Pastime Miner’s Museum in the dying town of Picher, located in far northeastern Oklahoma, two miles from the Kansas border and beyond the reach of cell phone coverage. The federal government is paying people to leave this former zinc and lead mining town, which is considered one of the worst environmental and health disasters in the nation by most everyone but Hoppy.
Hoppy says he will die before he leaves his hometown – even if his electricity and water are turned off.
Picher girl is still a Gorilla | The Oklahoman | August 20, 2006
PICHER – Driving her father’s mid-90s Ford Thunderbird to the first day of her senior year, Tracy Carder, 17, anxiously flipped between radio stations and wondered whether she could find any normalcy in what may be the last year of her school and her hometown.
‘After this, I don’t know … I don’t know’ | NewsOK.com | May 13, 2008
[Note: I headed up a small team of reporters that covered this deadly tornado in 2008]
PICHER — Bruised and battered, with her feet bandaged like cocoons and her ankles looking like they’d been splattered with ink, Kim Johnson returned Monday to her home in Picher for the first time since tornadoes tore through her town.
Growing excitement, expectations for green jobs corps | CNN | February 27, 2009
(CNN) — When Rita Bryer sees 300-foot-tall wind turbines sprouting up from the prairie near her home in western Oklahoma, she can’t help but wonder about the view from the top, where blades the size of semi-trucks spin.
Can world’s largest laser zap Earth’s energy woes? | CNN | April 28, 2010
Livermore, California (CNN) — Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world’s largest laser — it’s the size of three football fields — to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.
USB inventor is unlikely tech ‘rockstar’ | CNN | February 4, 2010
(CNN) — If you believe the ads, Ajay Bhatt is tech’s version of an arrogant rock star.
The co-inventor of USB — the near-ubiquitous technology that connects computers to cameras and other gadgets — strolls into an office looking nerd-confident in a sweater vest, tie and a puffed-up, game-show-host haircut in a TV commercial for Intel.
Extra innings | poynter.org | June 20, 2005
Before stepping up to bat, players in St. Petersburg’s 75-and-older softball league usually stop by the chainlink fence.
“You gonna hit me a home run today?” Kenny Marsh, 87, asks one of the players. He peers through the links from his usual stakeout, a lawn chair in the shadows.
