Selected Articles
Spilling the Tea in Sri Lanka
for Foreign Policy
As large colonial-era tea plantations crumble, family-owned plots are trying to take their place and save the industry.
For nearly a year now, Priyantha Gamage, the son of a Tamil tea plucker, has been documenting the scars and scabs of the tea plantation workers on the Deniyaya Estate in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. This is just one of his many projects aimed at recording and improving estate conditions while he finishes his studies to become a Catholic priest. He explained that after a brief national ban on the herbicide glyphosate, weed overgrowth in tea fields skyrocketed. The change in landscape provided a perfect breeding ground for leeches ...
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Inside the epic debate on rethinking our 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty
for Fast Company
This week, the UN begins a conference to start the long-overdue discussion on updating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty for a cosmos that has gotten a lot more complicated.
Space starts 62 miles away, but in the past few months it has felt much closer. Just yesterday, a pair of Japanese robots may have landed on an asteroid, as part of the country’s research efforts and amid a surge in startups focused on asteroid mining. Last week saw...
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Kidnappers, Quacks, and Go-Go Boys in One of Jared Kushner’s Buildings
Death! Destruction! Dutchmen! The history of one intersection in the East Village features murders, kidnappings, and a few famous names. Now the Spotted Owl Tavern occupies ground level at the northwest corner of Avenue A and 13th Street, the latest in a long line of bars at that location. There’s been a watering hole in that space (well, a saloon or maybe a bierpalast or a nightclub) for over 125 years, exempting, legally speaking, the unfortunate period between the 18th ...
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Truth, Lies, Wrestling and the American Way
for The Indypendent
It’s Saturday night inside a Knights of Columbus event hall in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey and The Dagger Mik Drake is here to wrestle. Variously colored paper streamers and fishing line — decorations from parties past — dangle from the ceiling. In the center of the room, a freshly assembled 15-square-foot wrestling ring quietly waits to be relevant. The black fiber ropes that surround it are taut, ready for performers to cling to them as if for their very lives. Around the room devotees clump together, wearing T-shirts supporting The Ugly Ducklings, The Fraternity, Danny Moff — some of the crowd’s favorites. A concession booth does business in one corner of the hall. Its menu, scrawled in a sidewinding hand... — keep reading.