Owlspotting

Vince — friends call him Vito — picks me up from the hotel I’m staying at in Myrtle Beach, SC. He has a plaid short sleeve shirt held together by the only buttons he crossed successfully over his belly. He looks like a cross between a skinnier Don Vito (of “Viva la Bam” fame) and […]

Am scris pentru “Dilema Veche” un articol despre uraganul Katrina si efectul pe care l-a avut asupra solidaritatii (sau lipsei de) americanilor: Puteti sa-l cititi aici.

Saturday afternoon I was walking into the NYC subway several yards behind this girl with a backpack. She was flip-flopping down the three flights of stairs ahead of me when she suddenly stopped, turned around and ran back. I watched her and assumed she was a stupid Japanese tourist. However, as I went further I […]

Today is one of those days when The New York Times turns its mighty eye to my home country of Romania. The topic is — and it comes as no surprise — orphans. Nicholas Wood has been covering Central and Eastern Europe for a while and his stories appear both in the International Herald Tribune […]

It was an interesting “pick your poison” day in downtown Washington, D.C. with a the huge antiwar protest that brought more than 150,000 people into the streets (says the Washington Post) and a huge National Book Festival. I took my camera off the shelf for the first time in a while and descended to the […]

I was cleaning ouy my grad school e-mail before it got purged and I came across this piece I wrote for one of Josh’s initiatives. Yes, it’s satire — and it’s written in the fall of 2003, a couple of months after I got to the U.S. >>> Most Americans dress in a similar manner. […]

So if conspiracy theorists likened hurricane Katrina to a fetus…. …what are they going to make of this image of hurricane Rita? What is God trying to say?

It’s official — I (sort of) follow baseball. It’s not my fault. It’s certainly not the fault of the game, which I’m still learning about and which I still consider a bore compared to soccer. It’s my city’s fault, I blame Washington. This what happened. Washington finally got a baseball team this season — the […]

Growing up in Eastern Europe, one had to choose his favorite actor carefully. Your pick would not only unveil your manliness to the whole block, but the actor would also have to act as a virtual bodyguard to your psyche. He would have to battle the other kids’s pick at least twice a week. Stallone […]

We are on the heels of a week of embarrassing debates regarding blame in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Embarrassing because the government, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are trying to pass the buck to state and local officials, while urging the country not to play “the blame game.” This week’s episode of […]