About Me

ABOUT ME

Hanging out in Ko Samet, Thailand, March, 2006

I grew up in Brooklyn during the 1970s and thus was exposed to a lot of interesting things in my youth.

I went to both public and private schools, allowing me the chance to experience different worlds. And my mother was a criminal court judge (later a Supreme Court Justice of NY), and when she took me to court with her, I was exposed to Brooklyn ‘70s court system craziness.

There was the time in a waiting area in the courthouse, for example, when I put my Mattell electronic football game down (it was really a bunch of blinking dots) for less than one minute and it got yoinked. I also remember hanging out with court officers named Harvey and Kevin, and we’d play this game where we flipped baseball cards against a wall for hours and I’d play with their metal detectors.

Baseball was an important part of my youth, as well as Jedi training fantasies and I spent a lot of time playing with my Kenner Death Star playset.

By the time I finished my time at Stuyvesant High School in 1990, I realized that I wanted to be a journalist. I had been a writer for the Stuyvesant Spectator covering things like students getting beaten down by the then-terrifying “Decepticon” gang..

I continued writing at Wesleyan University, as an editor at the Wesleyan Argus’ humor/arts section, but my favorite experience during my university years was when I studied abroad in Rome in 1993, which set off my love of travel.

At at age thirty, after working at a range of publications as an ad sales guy, and, not doing what I really wanted to be doing, I applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and got in.

My first job after getting my Master’s was on the editorial staff of OnEarth, the environmental magazine published by the non-profit group, Natural Resources Defense Council. After a year there, I landed a position as a producer for a show on the nationally syndicated Air America radio network and I contributed my own live reports and longer features. In the meanwhile, my written work appeared in publications such as New York Magazine, Newsday and E
Magazine.

Growing up, this was my view of the Bklyn Bridge!

In May 2005, I applied to a reporter job I saw listed in Bangkok for a new English newspaper launch that would be the local Thailand section in the International Herald Tribune. A couple weeks later, I got the job and soon I was flying to the other side of the planet.

Working for the newspaper was a thrill but it only lasted a year and a half. When I left the paper, I travelled the region and I discovered an exotic, exciting world in Southeast Asia with such extreme poverty and extreme beauty and it’s opened my eyes to so much. I am fortunate to have found steady work during this time with different media companies, international NGOs, UN agencies and private sector companies.

I am ready and inspired to continue writing, editing, producing videos, taking photos and to enjoy whatever new opportunities come my way.