The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey Wins a 2026 IPPY Award
My travel memoir The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey: An East-West Memoir has won a 2026 Independent Publisher Book Award, also known as an IPPY.
Continue reading →Tag: journalism
Veils of Distortion: Updated with a New Cover and Afterword
My media criticism book Veils of Distortion: How the News Media Warps Our Minds has been updated with new cover and an afterword.
Continue reading →Kaliningrad, Russia’s Inconspicuous Exclave
The inconspicuous Russian city and exclave of Kaliningrad, tucked into the bosom of northern Europe behind NATO lines, remains virtually unknown.
Continue reading →Daniel Boorstin’s ‘The Image’ and the News Media
Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is a scathing indictment of what the author saw as the emerging tendency in the United States at the time to manufacture and worship virtual experiences over the real.
Continue reading →Understanding News Distortion
A new book I’ve written, entitled Veils of Distortion explores how the news media distorts our perception of reality.
Continue reading →How the News Media Manipulates Our Emotions
As a mainstream news journalist, I’ve come to understand that news organizations work hard to garner our attention using any means possible. Their approach is to excite, anger, titillate, sadden and entertain—to whip up emotion—using the easiest and cheapest-to-produce stories available.
Continue reading →My Review of The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants explores the ways in which the big tech companies have turned human attention into a commercial commodity.
Continue reading →Is Travel Writing Dead?
Is narrative travel writing dead? A recent issue of Granta magazine asks doyens of the craft if the genre remains relevant and has a future.
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