Category Archives: Magazines

Getting Rila

May 2006

I was riding my mountain bike down a steep path into a wooded gorge. Niki Titev, a member of the Bulgarian national mountain biking team, was, predictably, far ahead of me when a woman emerged from the woods at the side of the trail. I stopped and smiled. Clad in a head scarf, her hands stained purple from picking blueberries, Nedjibe was a Pomak—a part of the Bulgarian Muslim minority. When I asked whether I could take her picture, she shook her head back and forth in the charmingly confusing Bulgarian gesture for yes.

While Titev comes to Rila to bomb down the ski runs at Borovets, Nedjibe comes to gather berries and fatten her sheep in the high summer meadows. Across a gulf of centuries, they have these mountains in common. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Travel + Leisure

Moby, Teany, and the Meaning of Life

August 2005

Moby is the very portrait of successful idiosyncrasy. Best known as an eclectic musician—his work has ranged from hard-edged punk rock to electronic dance music to pop ballads to ambient experiments—Moby is so much more. He’s a businessman (Teany, his New York teahouse, opened in 2002), and an artist (he is part of the Little Idiot, a collective of illustrators). But the reason he is a perennial favorite among Vegnews readers (who voted Moby “Favorite Musician” for the past two years) is because of his activism. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, VegNews

Schadenfreude

June 2005

Schadenfreude. Sha. Den. Froy. Duh. It hardly trips off the tongue, and that’s part of the point. Translated damagejoy, it was up to our friends in Germany—connoisseurs of suffering with wry wit–to cast this lexical spell. (Maybe it’s the long winters.) A single unified morsel of horrible, delicious pleasure, Schadenfreude is at once a dark threat to society and an essential mechanism for keeping it moving along in the face of the pointless absurdity and pain of existence. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Other Magazine