occasional news about me, my work, etc.
[April 11, 2008] My radio feature about undocumented students at UCLA, Just One Thing Missing, inspired a new play, by James E. Garcia. It premieres this month in Phoenix, as a fundraiser for the Dream Act.
[March 21, 2008] Just One Thing Missing reaired on This American Life this weekend.
[March 4, 2008] I ran a workshop on storytelling across different media for the kids at Youth Radio, in Oakland. They were a great, curious bunch of high schoolers, full of smart, sophisticated questions.
[November 19, 2007] I'm in New York, for the Drucker Awards for Nonprofit Innovation. I interviewed two Skoll Foundation social entrepreneurs on stage at BusinessWeek's auditorium: Jim Fructerman, of Benetech, who develops nonprofit technology, and William Foote, of Root Capital, who provides loans to farmers in the developing world so they can supply fair trade products to companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks.
[September 19, 2007] I wrote an op-ed on the Dream Act for today's Los Angeles Times.
[August 20, 2007] I gave a talk on undocumented immigrants and higher education at the Public Policy Institute of California.
[August 1, 2007] I'm in Aspen as a guest of the Blum Brookings Roundtable on global poverty. Lots of interesting people (pdf) here. Lots of conversation about mixing for-profit and non-profit approaches to fighting poverty.
[July 25, 2007] I moderated an event in West Hollywood on green city design for the Hollywood Hill, a new political nonprofit for the entertainment industry. Big crowd, good questions (90 minutes worth!)
[June 12, 2007] The Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families has awarded my cover story "The Invisibles" their Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
[May 22, 2007] "The Invisibles" won the Sidney Hillman Award for reporting on social and economic justice issues. I recevied it tonight in New York.
[May 5, 2007] I joined Dan Golden of the Wall Street Journal and Stephanie Banchero of the Chicago Tribune on a panel in Los Angeles, organized by the National Education Writers Association. We talked about narrative journalism.
[April 26, 2007] I've gotten a record number of e-mails and calls about my This American Life feature Just One Thing Missing. Still waiting for legislation, though.
[March 16, 2007] I won a First Prize in The National Education Writers Association Reporting Awards, in the magazine category, for The Invisibles.
[March 15, 2007] Go team! Three magazine issues that included one of my articles got nominated for National Magazine Awards this year: the August/September issue of Metropolis (General Excellence, under 100,000 circ), the May/June issue of Foreign Policy (General Excellence, 100,000-250,000 circ), and the August issue of Wired (General Excellence, 500,000 - 1,000,000 circ). See my articles here, here, and here. Plus, my old FP office neighbor Mark Strauss got a General Excellence nod as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
[February 28, 2007] I've noticed a couple new research projects on Japan's Gross National Cool: UCLA's Made in Translation, and Cool Japan: Media, Culture, Technology, a joint initiative at Harvard and MIT.
[October 20, 2006] Today, the web site gets a new feature. You can sign up for an RSS feed that will deliver full text versions of my articles as soon as they hit the newsstand. (Click here for more on RSS.)
[October 19, 2006] I'm in Chicago to moderate a panel on immigrant kids for the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children.
[September 14, 2006] I wrote a piece about the dearth of guidance and college counseling for kids in California schools for the Op-Ed page of today's Los Angeles Times.
[June 28, 2006] Voice of America interviewed me for a radio commentary, which looked at the ideas in "Lost in America".
[June 15-17] The Japan Society's U.S.-Japan Innovators Project hosted their first retreat, at the offices of Stone Yamashita Partners in San Francisco. I joined a small, eclectic group: Megan Smith (Google), Debra Dunn (Skoll Foundation), Justin Leach (Lucasfilm), Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow Wow), Cheryl Dorsey (Echoing Green), Kohei Nishiyama (Elephant Design), Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity), Mitsuhisa Ishikawa (Production IG) and others.
[June 1, 2006] The Boston Globe cited "Lost in America" in an editorial. So did New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff. Also, Gross National Cool lives on: Simon Dumenco writes about it in Conde Nast Traveler. (There are currently more than 20,000 hits on Google for the phrase "Gross National Cool," up from zero when the article ran.)
[April 30, 2006] Huge response for "The Invisibles." People have come forward with offers of scholarship money and commitments to fundraise. Still waiting for legislation, though.
[April 4, 2006] I guest lectured a class at the University of California at Berkeley.
[February 21, 2006] I wrote an Op-Ed for today's New York Times.
[February 5, 2006] The Los Angeles Times launches West, their new Sunday magazine. I'm joining them as a contributing writer.
[November 30, 2005] I'm in New York, moderating a panel conversation between the screenwriter Dai Sato and the philosopher Hiroki Azuma.
[August 26, 2005] I'm in Tokyo, to moderate a panel on globalization and brands at a Harvard business conference.
[July 27, 2005] I was on NPR today, talking about buprenorphine treatment for opiate addiction. Congress finally amended the restrictions on buprenorphine that I criticized this spring, in my article "The Bitter Pill."
[May, 2005] I've started volunteering as a writing tutor at 826 Valencia.
[April 15, 2005] My Travel + Leisure article, "Going the Distance," just won the Henry R. Luce Award, as the best feature of its genre to appear in one of Time Inc's 139 magazines in 2004. The contest was judged by Isolde Motley, John Huey, and Norman Pearlstein.
[April 4-18, 2005] I'm in Tokyo, interviewing leaders in all fields of culture and business, as groundwork for the Japan Society's planned Innovators Project. I will also lecture at a Japanese Diet committee, and at the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership.
[April, 2005] I just joined the New America Foundation as a fellow.
[February, 2005] As of February 1, I'll be based in Northern California.
[January, 2005] On Sunday the 2nd, I'll be a guest on K-Rock Magazine (92.5 FM in New York), with Bob Salter, talking about housing and homelessness.
[November, 2004] I'm off to the Center for Applied Policy Research, in Munich, for a roundtable on transatlantic security. We'll be simulating responses to a coordinated terrorist attack in Europe, and a humanitarian crisis in Algeria.
[July, 2004] I'm in New York with Rosanne Haggerty, Alan Webber, and the staff of the Japan Society, to begin planning a project to identify the next generation innovators in politics, business, and culture, across East Asia. I'll be back in Tokyo in the spring of 2005 to do some field research.
[January, 2004] Last November's Tokyo symposium spawned a new round of coverage for Gross National Cool: a bunch of articles in the Japanese press, plus a Washington Post cover story, and pieces in Le Monde, The Age, and the International Herald Tribune. Also a spot on Marketplace, and a nice mention in Forbes.
[November, 2003] I'm in Tokyo to give the keynote lecture at a symposium on "Cool Japan," hosted by the Nihon Keizei Shimbun. There will be a couple of panels, with "Iron Chef" Masaharu Morimoto, Tokyo University film professor Yasuki Hamano, Nikkei Weekly editor-in-chief Hirotsuku Koike, "Sailor Moon" director Kunihiko Ikuhara, playwright and Toa University president Masakazu Yamazaki, and Masakazu Kubo, creative director for the Pokemon franchise.
[October, 2003] "Biotech's Black Market," from the September/October issue of Mother Jones, was named a "notable article" in this year's edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.