Category Archives: Newspapers

March 25, 2007

IN Rio de Janeiro, every street corner offers an opportunity for refreshment: juice bars, açaí stands, open-air bars and of course botequins. These neighborhood institutions are part café, part lunch counter and part bistro; the place for a quick salgadinho, one of the salty snacks like fried balls of salt cod, and a cafezinho, the little cup of coffee beloved by Brazilians.

Bright with mirrors, cool tile and loud signs in red and yellow lettering, the botequins have a retro feel. Café Gaúcho, in downtown Rio, is a classic. It opens to a busy street corner, making the most of the city’s joyful culture and tropical air. Commuters step off the sidewalk to the cashier, offering a few coins in exchange for a chit, which they then take to the coffee counter.

Read it on the NYT site…

January 4, 2007

WILLIAM LEININGER is not your typical environmental zealot. A Navy commander who works as a doctor at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, he is a Republican and lives in one of California’s most conservative counties, in a development of neat lawns and Spanish-style houses. His 2,400-square-foot, single-level house — “the usual Southern California design,” he said recently — is barely distinguishable from its neighbors, apart from one detail: the red-tile roof is crammed with solar panels.

Dr. Leininger, 42, is one of thousands of Californians, many of them unlikely converts to the cause of alternative energy, who have installed solar power systems in their homes in just the last year.

Read the rest on the NYT site…
If the whole story’s not there, try this…

January 7, 2007

WHEN he moved there from France in 1940, Henry Miller, who had grown up in Brooklyn, called Big Sur his “first real home in America.” Running from Carmel, 150 miles south of San Francisco, to San Simeon, Big Sur’s mass of tight mountains pushes brazenly against the Pacific swell. Kelp forests sway at the feet of rugged sea cliffs. Deep valleys shelter some of the southernmost redwoods. The only way through this fastness is along winding, breathtaking California Route 1.

Nearly two decades after settling in, Miller wrote “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,” a collection of fond, philosophical sketches that expressed a nostalgia for the place born of his fear that Big Sur’s magic could only wane as more people came to visit. Certainly, summers can be a crush here, a paradise lost of RV traffic jams and overcrowded facilities.

Yet in winter, nature reasserts itself. Whales, elephant seals and monarch butterflies arrive after travels that have taken them thousands of miles. California sea otters, once thought extinct and rediscovered only in a single Big Sur cove, float among kelp beds as effortlessly as the recently reintroduced California condors soar above redwood crags.

Read it on the NYT site…

See what it looked like in the paper on Photographer Jeff Pflueger’s site…