I am a farmer trapped in a city-person’s body, torn between love of urban and yearning to grow vegetables, keep bees, preserve food. I know there are a lot of us around. Why should it be either/or? Although I’ve been figuring out country ways in my small city apartment for years, a new book has…
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My friend Steve Hamm is a Senior Writer at Business Week who blogs about innovation, globalization and leadership in his blog Globespotting. He recently had the good fortune to interview the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader whose words and practice resonate globally, especially in the West. Steve asked the Dalai Lama a number of…
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You’ve invited a crowd for dinner and you don’t have enough chairs…So, you take some long planks you happened to have hanging around for a construction project, or bought for just such emergencies, and expand a row of spaced chairs into double the seating with a bench. No matter how chic they become, a bench…
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Although I am not a designer, I decided to try designing a table base myself. Using a ruler and pencil, I made a drawing with the totally cockeyed perspective of an outsider artist (since I don’t really know how to draw) with the exact dimensions. Then I faxed it to a guy I’d heard about…
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For years I’ve been buying the same glass and worrying that it would be discontinued. Marta “Cooler” from CB2 is incredibly cheap ($2.50), has a beautiful, classic shape, and feels great in your hand because the glass is so thin (a rarity with cheap glasses). It is almost identical to a glass that chic design…
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It seems like it might be fortuitous to launch a blog on the eve of Independence Day, so I’ve decided to take my own advice and forgo the idea of it being “done”, “ready”, or “perfect”, and just send ‘the improvised life’ out into the world. Though I’ve been writing posts privately on-and-off for a…
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Laziness and exhaustion are the motivations behind many of my culinary improvisations; the desperate need to make something good as quickly as possible causes me flaunt notions I’d previously held sacred. In past cherry seasons, for example, I’d painstakingly pit pounds of cherries to make a warm stew to spill onto vanilla ice cream or…
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