Showtime, Himalayan Style [Take Me To Your Leader]

Yesterday the New York-based Himalayan community — including many of the Sherpas I have written about in Outside Magazine and The New York Times — hosted His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama for a 2-hour teaching at Radio City Music Hall. For me, as the organizers’ volunteer media liaison, it was a thrilling day that started with greeting the Dalai Lama’s entourage at a secret airport location for a blaze into midtown via high-speed armored motorcade; for the Sherpas and their friends, it was the fulfillment of a long-nourished dream, a visit from their spiritual leader audaciously and ingeniously pulled off from a cab driver’s apartment in Queens. Here, a few outtakes from the day, shot behind the scenes. 

Life Imitates Art [Flyers' Remorse]

From the first page of the recent and much-lauded Jonny Miles debut novel “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin) any weary traveler worth his industrial-strength earplugs will surely nod in baleful agreement with Miles’ assessment of the scabrous conditions considered normal in American commercial aviation. Apparently, some recent AA passengers didn’t get the memo (read: everybody loses) and decided to fight back. Which, in keeping with the way things go these days, backfired. But at least they tried. I was Miles’ researcher/fact-checker at Men’s Journal for a couple of years, which was a pleasure, especially working on one non-fiction ode to New Orleans bars in all their decadent glory. Catch him reading from his new book this Monday night the 14th at the Half King. I’ll be there. RELATED: Vicarious air rage was never so therapeutic nor generously rewarding. Buy the book.