Italian translation will appear in April 2024.
English publication to be announced.
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(Photography and Design are mine.)
(Written in solidarity with the impossibly brave citizens of Ukraine. This is scheduled to appear in an anthology, And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow, to be published in the fall by Kallisto Gaia Press.)
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“Caught on camera, the woman confronted a Russian soldier and asked him to keep sunflower seeds in his pocket so that they bloom when he dies.
Selfies, Watermarks, Despair.
(A feature in Travel+Leisure Magazine that won the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal from the Society of American Travel Writers and was republished by Pico Iyer in The Best American Travel Writing 2004.)
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I have made a career out of not enjoying Canada. It is one of the few things I do well. My radical malaise, Canada-wise, is associated mainly with Toronto the Good, and my hellish adolescence in that winter-benighted place.
(From Reviews of Amnesia)
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NEW YORK TIMES (MICHIKO KAKUTANI)“Amnesia (is a) chilly, chilling first novel…. Its elliptical narrative style recalls works by D.M. Thomas, Paul Auster, Sam Shepard and Vladimir Nabokov…. One gradually comes to appreciate Mr. Cooper’s copious gifts: his ability to manufacture odd, cinematic images; his talent for creating a musically patterned narrative out of repeated symbols and motifs; his willingness to tackle ambitious intellectual themes.”
(A series on PETA that was a finalist for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.)
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A celebrity is at her most vulnerable when naked. This is when she is least likely to make sensible decisions. Often she is chilly and nervous. Hence, it is while naked that a famous person — who genuinely loves animals — finds herself shilling for people who are genuinely committed to slaughtering them.
(The second piece I ever published was a national scandal, causing Saturday Night, Canada’s oldest and most prestigious magazine, to be pulled from newsstands across the Rockies. It went on to win a National Magazine Award.)
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Peerless natural beauty? I’ve always found it annoying. If you’re staying at the Banff Springs Hotel or Chateau Lake Louise, there’s no getting away from it: everywhere you look they put a view in front of your nose.
The sequel to Milrose Munce. (Photography and Design are mine.)
(The first piece I ever published: a profile of the world’s champion birdwatcher. This appeared in The Idler in 1988.)
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Terry Stevenson lives in the Kenyan Rift Valley. It is low land, near the equator and well into the interior, a formula for dry, choking heat. The soil parches into red dust, and the air, bewildered by sunstroke, wheels it up into dust devils and storms; much of the land ends up in the lake.
AN INTERVIEW with Novelist Douglas Anthony Cooper.
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(A dialogue published in Architecture magazine, which is no longer with us. The piece never appeared online. I did not own a copy for years, but I recently stumbled over this transcript: the conversation looks a bit quaint, in this century, but it’s a nice time capsule.)
“That’s the church my parents were married in,” says lovely Roberta. And then she whispers: “People used to practice black magic in the basement.”
Roberta is the woman designated to ferry us about Turin, the royal city in Piedmont at the foot of the Italian Alps. By Italian standards, this town is calm and efficient and sane.
The NRA has done the nation a tremendous service by rating politicians. The most manly — which is to say, the most servile — earn a solid A. Those most resistant to lockstep loyalty earn an F. Guide yourselves accordingly. Refuse to vote for a candidate who has received anything better than a D from the National Rifle Association. Be generous: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may not run again, but if he makes good on his change of heart — if he trades his disgraceful B rating for a D or an F — then offer him your qualified support.
How does a saint become a butcher?
I am convinced that Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) was once a good person. What happened?
The story of Newkirk’s moral awakening — outrage in response to betrayal — is genuinely affecting. In 1972, when she was a young stockbroker in Maryland, Newkirk rescued a group of abandoned kittens and brought them to an animal shelter.
(Because I came clean regarding my fraudulence — a full disclosure, in their own magazine — Food & Wine decided they’d continue to let me write articles for them.)
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I have never cooked a meal in my apartment. Okay, let’s be frank: I have never cooked a meal in my life. I have fried the occasional egg, toasted the odd bagel, boiled random pots of water, but this is lilydipping relative to the great canoe trip that is true cuisine.
Fifty years ago, the Xoloitzcuintli — the Mexican Hairless dog — was on the edge of extinction. Now one sleeps in my bed. Whether this is an improvement in the creature’s circumstance can be debated. Other bald news, however, is unquestionably good: After centuries honing its attributes as the world’s weirdest (not ugliest) dog, the Mexican Hairless was officially welcomed this year at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
(THIS REPRESENTS rank consumerism, but also haute geekery; I’ve always been proud of it. It was long lost, until a discerning blogger/pirate posted it, and I stole it back. I no longer have the photos, which I was also proud of: it was my first photo shoot with a large-format rig. The prices, I’m afraid, are wildly out of date. As is some of the advice — but not all of it.)
(A long short story published in The Adirondack Review many years before Donald Trump called for the expulsion of Muslims from America.)
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ON LABOR DAY the vultures disappeared. Nobody could remember when they had not circled early dawn: Death’s falcons, turning miles above the arid northwest reaches of Tribeca, tethered by scent.
(I just discovered this essay on an obsolete blog that I’d forgotten I’d ever had. Seems I wrote it on May 20, 2005. I’m proud of this piece. So I’m going to resurrect it.)
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In February 2002, President Bush announced that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
I admit to sneering when I first encountered the vast international community of flashlight addicts. Who are these losers, I generously wondered. These “flashaholics.” Perhaps the nerd equivalent of, say, those neurally healthy folk who have sex with plush toys? Only less interesting?
That was a month ago.
Since then, I have spent an absurd sum on exotic lights, complex chargers, volt-ohm meters, and — the seductive bit — batteries whose energy density
These are not the dim Boy Scout torches of your innocent youth.
THE MUSEUM OF NON-VISIBLE ART
(This was a collaborative project with Praxis and James Franco. I contributed two invisible works to the museum, and wrote the manifesto. I’m not sure we did more with the concept than Yoko Ono, but I remain happy with what I wrote.)
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(The invisible works themselves can be seen, as it were, elsewhere.)
I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER when I last experienced the beheading of a close friend. Everyone assumes it must be a weekly, or even a daily event: after all, I live in Mexico. The truth, however, is that you are as likely to have your head removed against your will in my town — Oaxaca — as you are to be murdered by roving, machete-crazed gangs in Martha’s Vineyard.
IT IS PAINFUL to be called an anti-Semite by a deceased saint. Yet the dead speak, even when we wish they’d keep their thoughts to themselves. There is a tremendous effort to deny that Martin Luther King ever said these words: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”
Unfortunately, he did.
By all means let’s put armed guards in public schools. I remember in kindergarten really wishing we had cops stalking the hallways: the kind armed and trained to take down determined shooters in bulletproof vests. The problem is that I was raised in Canada, where people aren’t free, so there was no reason for hall monitors to be grownups with assault rifles.
DEMOCRATS HAVE been disgracefully uncharitable to Rush Limbaugh. He has apologized for calling a perfectly decent woman a slut and a prostitute; he deserves generosity in return. The man’s fickle sponsors have been departing all weekend, like ships from a sinking rat, so I propose that Democrats demonstrate bipartisan moral support, by sponsoring Mr.
Who I was in the Nineties.
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(Writing. Media that was New at the time. Poorly scanned photography. Primitive graphics. Quite proud of this.)
The NRA’s famed slippery slope argument is entirely valid. Nobody seems to have noticed, however, that the slope is tilted in the opposite direction. Give the gun lobby a millimeter, and they’ll slide a mile. If they could dig a hole in the Second Amendment and stuff shoulder-launched missiles into it, they would never give up their cherished right to own them.