Current Passions
Year 2021
I am currently raising funds for my new book Vanishing Asia. The book is a huge, oversized, 1,000-page celebration of old Asia. The campaign runs until May 4, 2021. During this time I am offering discounts for pre-sales purchases. Head over to my Kickstarter site for more details.
My title is Senior Maverick for Wired, a magazine I helped co-found 28 years ago. At most, I write one article for Wired per year now. My most recent article is a cover story about augmented reality called Mirrorworld. It describes what I believe will be what happens after the web and smart phones. My other published writings are listed here, in chronological order.
I have spent 40 years photographing the disappearing traditions of Asia. Some of the traditions I photographed in the 1970s are now gone. You can see images from the book as I post them on social media: Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. This year I am putting 9,000 of my best images onto 1,080 pages in one book set. I have divided the pages into 3 volumes, each one 360 oversized pages. This 3 volume set is called Vanishing Asia. I am doing a Kickstarter campaign to make sure I reach at least 1,000 true fans. The books will be offered at a huge discount before going on sale on Amazon later in the year.
About five years ago I started a weekly newsletter, called Recomendo. Together with Mark Frauenfelder, of Boing Boing fame, and Claudia Dawson, our webmaster and my assistant, we give 6 very short recommendations each week. On one page we share the great stuff we using, watching, listening to, and tips we recommend. Recomendo now has 50,000 subscribers and we have published over 200 issues. It’s free. Sign up here.
I am creating YouTube videos. My first set are 36 lectures on the future that I produced for China Mobile. Each one is approximately 18-minutes long. I pontificate on the future of X, where X is anything from flying cars to genetic engineering. I am also creating videos of making complicated projects, such a toy bridge, or flower presses, or an ecosphere. The channel is called TRY, and it is a subchannel of the Cool Tools channel on YouTube.
