Here’s a tough question: What does it mean to be a visionary? Here’s an even tougher challenge: Give your answer in 100 words or less.

Yesterday I witnessed the emergence of a monarch butterfly in my backyard. It was a stirring experience. A month ago, I had noticed several caterpillars gorging themselves on a milkweed plant in our garden. After fattening up and devouring every last leaf of the plant, the caterpillars all disappeared. Later I found that one of them [...]

I had my first espresso in a backstreet café in Venice. It must have been 1985 or ’86. I had arrived on the night train from Zagreb, Croatia, achy from a long and sleepless night. I stumbled out of the train station and into a café and ordered a coffee. What I didn’t know was [...]

My blog has been unusually quiet in recent weeks and months. I’ve been busy juggling several projects and it seemed as if all the deadlines converged at once. Frankly, my head has been spinning for the last two or three months. What have I been working on? One project was a year-long study I led [...]

The site topped four million hits in August — a new record. The spike can be partly explained by the popularity of my photos from the Burning Man festival. The response has been tremendous. A nod from MetaFilter, the Net’s premier “Best of the Web” site, along with links from some fifty-plus blogs, has brought a surge of [...]

The 2006 Burning Man festival kicked off last night in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. In a story today, ABC News described the event variously as “the Woodstock of Generation X,” a “weeklong party for iPod nerds and punk-rock pixies,” and “a massive drug-fueled orgy of the senses.” (Click here for story.) For the record, Burning Man is [...]

My short review of E.L. Doctorow’s essay collection Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitutionappears in Contemporary Literary Criticism, to be published by Thomson Gale later this year. Lest anyone think that reviewing books can make you rich, my reprint check came to $17.75 — just barely covering the cost of the book itself.

SCOTTLONDON.COM is in the throes of a much-needed facelift. The makeover is almost complete. The site has a new look and several important new features. The most obvious change is the addition of more graphic content, including a special section devoted to image galleries and photo essays. I’ve also introduced a guestbook — a much-requested feature that [...]

A fascinating and disturbing article in today’s New York Times examines how the Chinese have displayed “an American-style passion for the automobile.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the city of Shanghai, writes reporter Howard French. “For Shanghai, as for much of China, getting rich and growing attached to cars have increasingly gone hand [...]

A couple of years ago, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change and the Kettering Foundation invited me to take part in a series of dialogues among prominent foundation executives and nonprofit directors about the challenges of community-building. While the grantmaking community is reluctant to openly admit it, there is a pervasive sense today that community [...]

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a project aimed at assessing post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka. The question we’re asking is whether the massive relief effort in South Asia is working as intended — whether people are receiving the aid they have been promised, whether they have a voice in [...]