Current Passions
Year 2020
My title is Senior Maverick for Wired, a magazine I helped co-found 25 years ago. I do one article for Wired per year. My most recent article is a cover story about augmented reality called Mirrorworld. It describes what I believe will be what happens after the web and smart phones. My other published writings are listed here, in chronological order.
About four years ago I started a weekly newsletter, called Recomendo. Together with Mark Frauenfelder, of Boing Boing fame, and Claudia Dawson, our webmaster and my assistant, we give 6 very short recommendations each week. On one page we share the great stuff we using, watching, listening to, and tips we recommend. Recomendo now has 37,000 subscribers and we have published over 200 issues. It’s free. Sign up here.
I do a weekly podcast with Mark Frauenfelder where we ask a notable maker to rave about four of their favorite tools. We took the first two years of podcasts and extracted the best tool recommendations into a very visual book, Four Favorite Tools. It’s 300 pages and features great stuff from Adam Savage, Tim Ferriss and other remarkable people.
I am creating YouTube videos. My first set are 36 lectures on the future that I produced for China Mobile. Each one is approximately 18-minutes long. I pontificate on the future of X, where X is anything from flying cars to genetic engineering. My YouTube channel also has other video experiments I am trying.
I spent the past year designing and producing a very large photobook called Vanishing Asia. It contains almost 1,000 pages and almost 9,000 photographs that I took in my extensive travels in Asia. For 40 years I have been capturing the scenes of Asia that are disappearing. In some of the images taken many years ago, what I captured is now gone. My more recent images show pockets of Asia where some traditions remain. I hope the book will be published later this year. You can see images from the book as I post them on social media: Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook.
Six years ago I published my first fiction, The Silver Cord. I worked on it for 11 years! At 464 oversized pages, this huge book was fan-funded, the result of a successful Kickstarter-funded campaign. It is now available on Amazon. The Silver Cord contains two volumes of an epic story about angels and robots and a girl hero who must save the humans in between. The craftsmanship of the printing, including a 6-page fold out, is stunning. It has to be seen to be believed.
