Coeur de pirate: Blonde

Listening to: Coeur de pirate

Béatrice Martin, who goes by the stage name Coeur de pirate, is a wildly, fantastically talented singer-songwriter from Montreal. She has just released her second solo album—the excellent Blonde—and she’s only 22. Like many listeners outside of France and Quebec, I … [read more]

Pure i-20 iPod Dock - Frontal

Review: Pure i-20 iPod dock

I had read about the i-20 iPod dock a few months ago. It seemed like a very exciting proposition: a dock that could extract the digital signal of the music stored on an iPod without relying on the iPod’s own … [read more]

Jennifer Johannesen - No Ordinary Boy (2011)

Read: Jennifer Johannesen, No Ordinary Boy

My partner Jennifer recently published her first book. It’s a slim volume of 145 pages called No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney. One could generically describe it as memoir or narrative non-fiction. No Ordinary Boy is the … [read more]

A Quiet Place in Paris by Alias Rex via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

Buddhism, moral philosophy, Derek Parfit

I recently read this in an article in the Shambhala Sun, a magazine about Buddhism: Here is another practice, rooted in Zen tradition, which you might enjoy. Sit down with someone you care about and have a cup of tea. … [read more]

Tower Bridge

London, summer 2011

I had previously been to London on business — multiple times in fact, in the late 1990s. Those were the heady days of the dot-com boom, and I came away with the impression of a beautiful, sprawling city filled with hard-drinking … [read more]

One Ring by Xander via Wikipedia (Creative Commons)

One blog to rule them all

Until yesterday, I had three blogs. It just sort of happened that way. When I first started blogging in 2007, the trend seemed to be that blogs should be narrowly defined and specific to a topic. I couldn’t see how … [read more]