My son has always been a tinkerer. We still laugh about his childhood dream of wanting to build an airplane in our backyard. I pointed out we had no tires for the plane to land with and he said, “They sell tires at Costco.” I pointed out we had no
My son has always been a tinkerer. We still laugh about his childhood dream of wanting to build an airplane in our backyard. I pointed out we had no tires for the plane to land with and he said, “They sell tires at Costco.” I pointed out we had no
Last year I wrote about my favorite books of the year and mentioned The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin as the one most deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. At that time I had not finished the book, but now it’s an even easier statement. This is a great book.
A week ago I landed at SFO and finished my trip through Southeast Asia. As you’d guess it’s been a hectic week of catching up. And of scratching flea bites. But one week gives enough distance from the trip to focus on the important things I learned. It’s not exactly
Got home this morning and thought I’d repost this short conclusion. It was in my last post about Chiang Rai but it was buried at the bottom. It deserves more attention. This journey has been about contrasts. From the strange backwater country of Myanmar to the bustling global center of
I write this from the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai. It’s a remote region famous for the Golden Triangle, a once thriving opium trade, and the beautiful Doi Chang mountains. This is a rural area that is growing fast. The talk of the town is a super highway being
My last post focused on my time in the Klong Toey Slum of Bangkok and the challenges of human trafficking and poverty. How to handle such complex problems? Well, one way is to do what I did. Fly to Singapore and forget about it. Envelope myself in luxury. Let
“Poverty is the trafficker,” said my daughter. With those words all of us on The SOLD Project Activist Vision Trip saw the many threads of human trafficking weave together into an abhorrent evil of economic injustice. We were in Lok 3 of the Klong Toey Slum of Bangkok when
Myanmar is a fascinating country and my short visit was illuminating. There is a mix of 19th and 20th Century forces at work — oxen pulling carts, holdover totalitarian governments from the Cold War era, Buddhist pagodas everywhere, Coca-Cola signs, traditional rice farming, Colonial era architecture and at least