About MeI'm a reporter and occasional photographer. I grew up in Paris and Mallorca, studied political science at the University of Geneva, and lived in, and reported from, New Jersey, Los Angeles, New York, San Juan, Paris, Lagos, Moscow, the North Pole, Brussels, Almaty, Honolulu and Washington, D.C., where I now live with my two teenage daughters.
I'm the author of The Oddest Place on Earth: Rediscovering the North Pole, an account of the birth of post-Soviet polar tourism that I witnessed during five glorious trips there. I have written for The New York Times and Science, whose regular stringer I was in Kazakhstan and Hawaii, as well as The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian (September 2008 cover story), Nature, Earth Island Journal, Inter-Press Service, Sailing, Yachting, Conde Nast Traveler, New Zealand Geographic and many others. |
"It wasn't the safest place in the world, but it was gorgeous. And for eight glorious days, the most otherworldly place on Earth would be ours." |
Things Are Not Always What They Seem
Over the years, I've been surprised by the number of seemingly straightforward stories that turn out to be not at all what they seemed.
Those pretty Pacific atolls will sink and disappear below a rising sea? Nope, they will rise with it, as I wrote in Science, The Atlantic, IPS and Le Figaro.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area was a gift to humanity from the nation of Kiribati because all fishing was suspended, at a considerable cost to the Pacific island nation? Actually, fishing -- and overfishing -- continued unabated for the first seven years, then-president Anote Tong's claims to the contrary And when it was finally closed to fishing, in 2015, Kiribati suffered not a whit: the foreign fishing fleets simply caught the wandering tuna elsewhere and Kiribati's licensing revenues kept rising, as I reported in The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Science.
Who were the first men to stand at the North Pole? Not Peary, not Cook: they both lied. It was a then-secret Soviet expedition consisting of three LI-2's, Russian copies of the DC-3, that landed near there, with 24 men aboard, on April 23, 1948. And they nearly didn't make it out, as I reported in 1999 in Historia, in Polar Record, the quarterly of the Scott Polar Research Institute of Cambridge University, and in more detail in my book.
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement is a great victory for the environment? Not really, all it does is weaken the First Nations' rights, as I wrote in the Earth Island Journal and Nature.
Hawaii, with its balmy trade winds and vast distance from any continent, is the one place where you can safe from poisonous pesticides, right? Wrong. Some of the highest densities of toxic chemicals in the world are being sprayed on GMO cornfields by Monsanto et al, often just feet away from homes, schools and roads, as I reported in The Guardian, IPS and Earth Island Justice.
The gorgeous, 266-foot Falls of Clyde, one of the last four-masted schooners left afloat and the world's only all-sail tanker, is the pride of Honolulu, where it sits next to the legendary Aloha Tower. Wrong: as I documented in The New York Times, its history is one of neglect bordering on outright fraud.
"One hundred percent pure" New Zealand is run by environmentally friendly governments, right? Actually, the fishing industry is rife with corruption and mismanagement, and one victim is the small Maui's dolphin, of which only a few dozen remain, as I chronicled in Science, Le Figaro and The Ecologist. And two-third of the rivers are so polluted by cow dung it's forbidden to swim in them.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for having forsaken the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal, which he accidentally inherited from the Russians in 1991? Not quite: he never had a choice. The Russians always had complete control over it. And I never found a taker for the story.
Those pretty Pacific atolls will sink and disappear below a rising sea? Nope, they will rise with it, as I wrote in Science, The Atlantic, IPS and Le Figaro.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area was a gift to humanity from the nation of Kiribati because all fishing was suspended, at a considerable cost to the Pacific island nation? Actually, fishing -- and overfishing -- continued unabated for the first seven years, then-president Anote Tong's claims to the contrary And when it was finally closed to fishing, in 2015, Kiribati suffered not a whit: the foreign fishing fleets simply caught the wandering tuna elsewhere and Kiribati's licensing revenues kept rising, as I reported in The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Science.
Who were the first men to stand at the North Pole? Not Peary, not Cook: they both lied. It was a then-secret Soviet expedition consisting of three LI-2's, Russian copies of the DC-3, that landed near there, with 24 men aboard, on April 23, 1948. And they nearly didn't make it out, as I reported in 1999 in Historia, in Polar Record, the quarterly of the Scott Polar Research Institute of Cambridge University, and in more detail in my book.
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement is a great victory for the environment? Not really, all it does is weaken the First Nations' rights, as I wrote in the Earth Island Journal and Nature.
Hawaii, with its balmy trade winds and vast distance from any continent, is the one place where you can safe from poisonous pesticides, right? Wrong. Some of the highest densities of toxic chemicals in the world are being sprayed on GMO cornfields by Monsanto et al, often just feet away from homes, schools and roads, as I reported in The Guardian, IPS and Earth Island Justice.
The gorgeous, 266-foot Falls of Clyde, one of the last four-masted schooners left afloat and the world's only all-sail tanker, is the pride of Honolulu, where it sits next to the legendary Aloha Tower. Wrong: as I documented in The New York Times, its history is one of neglect bordering on outright fraud.
"One hundred percent pure" New Zealand is run by environmentally friendly governments, right? Actually, the fishing industry is rife with corruption and mismanagement, and one victim is the small Maui's dolphin, of which only a few dozen remain, as I chronicled in Science, Le Figaro and The Ecologist. And two-third of the rivers are so polluted by cow dung it's forbidden to swim in them.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for having forsaken the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal, which he accidentally inherited from the Russians in 1991? Not quite: he never had a choice. The Russians always had complete control over it. And I never found a taker for the story.