CURRENT MISSION

To live deep and suck out all the marrow of life

ABOUT ME

I am passionately engaged in learning about the world from both a natural and historical point of view. I like nothing more than deep conversations about life, the universe, and everything (and perhaps Douglas Adams as well).

PHILOSOPHY

Reading, writing, arithmetic

Interests

Right now my life is taken up with my research and writing. I write both for professional magazines like Discover and Times Higher Education as well as my blog The Primate Diaries hosted by Scientific American.

• culture
• writing
• education
• wine
• reading
• blogging
• biology
• ecology
• teaching
• emergency services
• physics

Music, Movies, and Books

Favorite Movies:

Mindwalk, Children of Men, Contact, Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, Amelie, The Edukators, Do the Right Thing, Iron Jawed Angels, Syriana, Malcolm X, I Heart Huckabees, O Brother Where Art Thou, Citizen Kane, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Zapatista, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, The Corporation, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, The Battle of Algiers, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, A Clockwork Orange, The Seventh Seal, Farewell My Concubine, Stardust Memories, Manhattan, Red Violin

Favorite Books:

--------------- Science: ---------------

On the Origin of Species, The God Delusion, Mother Nature, Guns Germs & Steel, Collapse, Peacemaking Among Primates, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Cosmos, The Turning Point, A Primate's Memoir, Ishmael

--------------- Politics: ---------------

Hegemony or Survival, Deterring Democracy, A People's History of the United States, An Ordinary Citizen's Guide to Empire, Living My Life, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, No Logo, The Shock Doctrine

--------------- Literature: ---------------

Hamlet, 1984, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Galapagos, Geek Love, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Slaughterhouse Five, The Metamorphosis, Notes from the Underground, Beloved, Brave New World, Breakfast of Champions

--------------- Authors: ---------------

Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Sarah Hrdy, Jared Diamond, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Joseph Campbell, Chuck Palahniuk, Jack Kerouac

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Looking for work with Albanian and Macedonian day laborers in a small village in Crete, Greece.
Watching unarmed indigenous protestors in Oaxaca, Mexico stand up to police who would expel them from their land.
Observing the Paris skyline at night with a bottle of wine.

Teach, Learn, Share

"A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be."

—Fritjof Capra, physicist and ecologist, from The Web of Life (1997)
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"There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole."

—Ernst Mayr, biologist, from Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976)
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"The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."

—Octavio Paz, Mexican poet

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Canada, France, Greece, Netherlands, United States