I discovered bedbugs and modafinil on the same eventful night a little over a year ago in San Francisco. I had just moved back from China and was staying in a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and - thanks to a pharmacologically more adventurous friend - four 100mg Provigil tablets in my wallet. I w…

The defining characteristic of a Second World country is the non-absorbent napkin.

From Moscow to Valparaiso, if your café napkin is a square of waxed paper that takes grease from your lips and spreads it to the rest of your face, you can be certain of encountering the whole constellation of other traits common to those industrialized countries where people ma…

The best bus ride in my life was in Argentina. I needed to cross Patagonia, from Trelew to the town of Esquel in the foothills of the Andes, on an overnight bus over gravel roads. My only point of reference was a backbreaking Greyhound bus trip across the United States taken when I was nine years old,…

If you are a fan of the HBO series 'The Wire', check out this amazing necklace and braclet by my friend Lori, a woman whose thousand talents apparently also include making jewelry:

She tells me she is willing to make and sell pie…

Porteños greeted the new year by fleeing the city as fast as gridlocked roads could take them. January is the month Buenos Aires takes its summer vacation, and the destination of choice is Mar del Plata, a seaside resort I have never visited. Given my love for crowds, heat and strangers' children it sounds it would be my own personal Mordor. "You can't even see the sand for …

At christmastime the streets of Buenos Aires are full of fruitcake. Eternal, inedible, weighing as much as a thousand suns, this is a scary pastry even in countries that lack the Argentine anti-talent for baking. But in Buenos Aires it becomes something I don't have the courage to buy, even for kicks. How is it that on all the numberless ships that brought Italian immigrants t…