Review: Javatrekker

November, 2007

To bring us our daily cup of coffee, nearly 30 million farmers in more than 50 countries toil in conditions unimaginable for most drinkers. “All of the major issues of the twenty-first century — globalization, immigration, women’s rights, pollution, indigenous rights and self-determination — are being played out through this cup of coffee in villages and remote areas around the world,” writes Dean Cycon in the prologue to his new book, Javatrekker.

Cycon is well-placed to show readers what it means to use global trade to consciously create a better world: he’s a founder of Coffee Kids, a nonprofit that uses donations from coffee companies to improve the lives of children in coffee-growing regions. And Dean’s Beans, his Massachusetts-based Fair Trade coffee company, is the epitome of a successful and proactive progressive business.

Read it on the Common Ground site…

Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times

Snobless Sipping Where a Glassful Is Just a Glassful

September 9, 2007

THE wine bar is a simple idea, yet it can be fraught. A wall of unfamiliar labels, obscure descriptions and extravagantly wine-schooled patrons can evoke a nagging vertigo.

But in San Francisco, a city known for both its casual culture and obsession with quality food and drink, a visit to a wine bar can be an unpretentious pleasure. The city has long had wine bars — the London Wine Bar, downtown, opened in 1974 and is said to have been the first in the United States. Now, a wave of new wine bars has been opening, often in unexpected neighborhoods.

I met with Alder Yarrow, the obsessive and opinionated writer behind vinography.com, a blog that exhaustively chronicles San Francisco’s wine bars. We sat at the long zinc bar at Nectar (3330 Steiner Street; 415-345-1377; www.nectarwinelounge.com), a wine bar in the Marina District. The place was just starting to fill up, and summer evening light flooded the tall, narrow space.

Read it on the NYT site…

Posted in New York Times, Newspapers

The World on Your Desktop

As the internet becomes intertwined with the real world, the resulting “geoweb” has many uses

Sep 6th 2007

“EARTH materialises, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore.”

That vision from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992, aptly describes Google Earth, a computer program that lets users fly over a detailed photographic map of the world. Other information, such as roads, borders and the locations of coffee shops can be draped on to the view, which can be panned, rotated, tilted and zoomed with almost seamless continuity. First-time users often report an exhilarating revelatory pang as they realise what the software can do. As the globe spins and switches from one viewpoint to another, it can even induce vertigo. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, The Economist