It is a cliché of great truth: In Tokyo, one of the most crowded and kinetically frenzied cities on Earth, it is easy to be alone. I spent a lot of time alone in Tokyo in 2012—in my apartment, in restaurants, and in seedier parts of the city—during the five weeks in April and May [...]
The older I get, the less I believe in Santa Claus. I sure hope he still believes in me. It’s been a hell of a year. I helped good people do some good things (check out Quakebook and Kizuna) and I helped myself do some bad things (too many late nights, missed deadlines, cans of [...]
The story behind this is pretty short: I offered to write some lyrics for a friend to sing at a recent benefit show for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan, and he didn’t use them. Oh, he thought what I’d written was lovely, but too long. And they just didn’t fit the tone of the [...]
For the past several weeks, it has been both my honor and good fortune to be heavily involved in Quakebook, a project conceived by one Twitter user as a way to collect and publish stories by real people who lived through the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake in Japan. My colleagues and I have been getting the [...]
