Your 50th Yearbook entry:
I began writing for magazines and newspapers before I got out of college, kept at it while trying to decide what to do for a living, and basically never came up with a better idea. It's been a good ride. From Boston we moved on to NY (where the boys were born) and then, on a whim, to New Orleans and Costa Rica. In semi-retirement, Jane and I have been dividing our time between Mexico, New Orleans and a wreck of a farm in south Mississippi.
Covering wars and disasters around the world has made for adventure, if not vast wealth. Picked up Pulitzers for newspaper work, and NPR declared my tome, "Breach of Faith," the "best of the Katrina books." An earlier book, "Desire Street," about a Louisiana death row case, was a finalist for the American Bar Association's Silver Scribe Award. In 2008-9 I was back in Cuba, a favorite reporting venue for many years, as part of a delegation swapping insights about low-tech, low-cost ways to cope with natural disaster. After the BP mess in the Gulf, I did a stint as senior consultant to Obama's National Oil Spill Commission. Last year I made a documentary about the Fukushima tsunami and reactor meltdown for NHK, Japan's equivalent of PBS. When not hugging a hammock here in Mexico and working on my next book, I go north to do lectures, radio interviews and that sort of thing.
Those are the highlights, I guess, but the deeper satisfaction in a footloose career has been getting to sit down with all manner of interesting people — rich, poor, talented, depraved — and ask blunt questions about what makes them and their worlds tick. With that privilege comes another one: the chance to praise what seems worthwhile and to take the occasional potshot at the inmates now running the asylum in Washington and on down the political chain of command.
The boys are great. Jedidiah quit Apple to become an early hire at a cab company called Uber. In June he got married to MIT classmate Ana Albir, in her native Bogota. They're in San Francisco. Eli and Liz are in New York, where he works for Google in capacities too esoteric for me to grasp, let alone describe.
Jane and I are in reasonably good shape and look forward to the reunion and the chance to see old friends. It's been too long.
