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China fights a skirmish in an ongoing culture war between preserving the past and embracing the future [NYT] Global concerns about control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are justified as well-organized guerrilla fighters demonstrate the difficulty if not impossibility of defeating them without massive alteration of underlying cultural conditions [Al Jazeera, NYT, BBC video, WSJ slide … Read more

With a steady flow of information highlighting the news industry’s woes, I couldn’t help but begin to wonder about the Internet’s transformation of the larger economic and cultural structures in which businesses, people and, oh, everything else, operate. In the most dramatically general sense, the human race is shifting from reality to virtual reality. This … Read more

Isn’t that just another way to say, “It’s not the destination; it’s the journey”? Or, “The means are the end”? Sure. But like any idea experienced firsthand, it feels new when it becomes real in your life. This one hit me while discussing photography with a practitioner of the trade from Hong Kong who was … Read more

What: A mission to Afghanistan by a team of doctors and a photographer is captured beautifully, tangibly and memorably with a mixture of first-person journaling, documentary photographs, delicate layout and gentle drawings. Recommendation: Buy it and join a humanitarian adventure inside a little understood country. Thirty dollars, what I paid at Forbidden Planet in New … Read more

Eminem’s latest release, “Relapse,” provides the usual lyrical tongue-twisting from the dexterously poetic rapper, but fails to surprise or inspire. Yes, it is an enjoyable, tightly wrought album offering a thuggish perspective on drug addiction and the escape from it, but it fails to move Eminem forward (or backward) as an artist. However, I don’t … Read more

Baseball-saving Sonia Sotomayor inspires accusations of judicial activism as she graduates from the school of hard knocks to possibly become the first Hispanic to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court [NYT, WSJ, USAT, BBC] Powerful judicial institutions chat about legalities instead of gay marriage in California while voters pursue their preferred form of justice … Read more

When 17-year-old University of New Mexico freshman John Perry wants news about Albuquerque, he doesn’t pick up a paper. Instead, he visits four Web sites, one of which is run by volunteers, employs no journalists and isn’t trying to be a news organization. It’s called Duke City Fix , and even though Perry enjoys the … Read more

In Thailand, you can abandon your troubles and start anew for a few dollars with the help of some monks, a white sheet and a coffin. It’s the easiest death and rebirth I’ve ever seen. On this piece, I edited footage from a freelancer around voice over supplied by Seth Mydans, the author of the … Read more

After editing a freelancer’s footage of a remarkable golf video game in South Korea, I had only one question: Is virtual basketball out yet? On nytimes.com.

After a marathon sprint, ample footage of the Olympic torch protests and one energetic demonstrator in Hong Kong has been turned into 2 minutes and 38 seconds of video journalism. I shot and edited the video while a producer for the International Herald Tribune. I also performed all of the interviews, and provided the voice … Read more