Lately, I’ve been asking friends who profess to know something about the Interweb how I go about increasing traffic to my website. Better yet, how do I get those same people to visit my Byliner page? Byliner posts my articles to its site, then charges subscribers to read them. You get my stories, beautifully formatted, of course, delivered to your iPad, iPhone, or i-Whatever. Kindles, too! That’s worth something, right? Get the app here. For me, it’s free money, sort of. Before Byliner, my entire portfolio sat idle on my website, earning nothing. The generous editors at Byliner offered to take my prose and post it online—and then give me a cut of the profits. So here’s the deal: If I can drive a million people a day to my Byliner page, and get them all to subscribe, I can buy a big yacht and go kiteboarding with my family for the rest of my life. Please help me fulfill this dream. I’m told I can achieve this by doing something called “Search Engine Optimization.” But until I figure that out, I’ll just repeat this link: Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner, Byliner. That’ll work, right?
2013 archives
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Air & Space | August 2013
The Other Guys Download PDF
NASA needs a space taxi. The likely pick is SpaceX—but don’t count out Colorado-based Sierra Nevada.
Standing beside Dream Chaser, it’s hard to ignore its resemblance to the space shuttle. It’s smaller—only 30 feet long from nose to tail—and the wings are upswept and canted. But in overall shape, the kinship is clear. Still, the company building this vehicle says it is not trying to make Shuttle 2.0. “We’re not fixing all the shuttle’s problems,” avows Jim Voss, the avuncular vice president of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Exploration Systems division. “We’re an evolutionary step from the shuttle, taking everything we learned from it and applying that to our vehicle to take [spaceflight] to the next generation.” Continue reading
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Virtuoso Life | September/October 2013
How to Launch a Spaceline Download PDF
Your ticket to the stars
If you’re the founder of the world’s premier commercial spaceline, finding a CEO with firsthand experience isn’t possible. So when Richard Branson began hunting for an executive to lead Virgin Galactic, he searched for a candidate who had not only dabbled in all realms of spaceflight, but also one whose imagination was as boundless as his own. Luckily, Branson met George Whitesides. When Whitesides, 39, joined Virgin Galactic in May 2010 as president and CEO, he had already served two years as chief of staff at NASA. His duties spanned the agency’s 150-plus ongoing missions—from probes to far-flung galaxies to satellites that survey our changing climate. Before NASA, Whitesides directed the National Space Society, a grassroots advocacy group that champions efforts to colonize other planets. He’s done stints at two space-tourism firms—Zero Gravity and Blastoff Corporation—and was an advisor to the FAA. From his multifaceted career, Whitesides says he’s learned, above all, that spaceflight requires unrelenting perseverance: “You have to go into it with commitment and stick to it.” Think you have the right stuff? Here are the next five steps. Continue reading
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OUTSIDE | JULY 2013
Snowstradamus Download PDF
Joel Gratz is a Colorado skier who puts out winter storm alerts that track the essentials: where exactly the snow will fall, how much, and when. As fellow weather nerd Michael Behar finds out, it’s wonderful when it works.
Joel Gratz is making me nervous. It’s midmorning on a snowy Colorado day in March, and we’re riding the Sun Up triple chair in Vail’s Back Bowls. Gratz has scooched his butt to the very edge of the seat, and now he’s thrashing his right arm to and fro, determined to capture a few flakes with his mittened fist. Whenever Gratz talks about the weather—snow especially—the 31-year-old meteorologist can forget where he is, speaking in a nonstop stream. “I usually just tune it out,” says his girlfriend, Lauren Alweis, who is skiing with us. Continue reading
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The White Stuff | July 1, 2013
There are some perks that come with freelance journalism. Pay isn’t one of them. Powder is. I live in Colorado, less than two hours from Vail, where I buy my annual ski pass. Working from home, for myself, mostly on my own schedule, means I can be extraordinarily picky about the days I choose to ski. And picky I am. For me, it’s weekdays only, with a minimum of six inches of new snow overnight—and that’s after lifts close. I don’t like wind, crowds, or tracks. Freelance writing means skiing only epic days, and then making all your friends hate you by posting photos of the spoils to Facebook. Obnoxious? Perhaps. My profile of Joel Gratz in Outside introduces you to the man that has made this pickiness possible. Continue reading
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Men’s Fitness | July 2015
When Stress Doesn’t Suck Download PDF
What you think is killing you should actually make you stronger.
“You seem tense,” my iPhone texts me, and suggests I take a brief meditation break. Is it reading my mind?
No, it’s just a message from the two-inch-long gray orb attached to the waistband of my jeans, called Spire, which monitors my respiratory rhythms and alerts me whenever it senses a period of rapid, shallow breaths. Spire was invented by Neema Moraveji, Ph.D., a computer scientist who directs Stanford University’s Calming Technology Lab, where his team has studied prototypes like Mail0, touted as “the world’s first calming e-mail client,” as well as Morphine Drip, an app for injured athletes stressed out because they can’t play. “We’re also trying to bring natural elements into sterile work environments,” says Moraveji. “This includes outfitting desks with real grass.” Continue reading
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All Shook Up | April 30, 2013
My recent feature in Mother Jones magazine adds to the anti-fracking arsenal. Activists rejoice. Before reporting this assignment, I was neutral on fracking, mostly because I didn’t know much about it. What I discovered is that fracking is an ingenious way of getting fossil fuels out of the ground. It’s also woefully under-regulated to the point where outright bans might make sense. Even those within the industry confessed to me that the fracking boom is the “lawless Wild West” all over again. Continue reading
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Mother Jones | March/April 2013
Whose Fault? Download PDF
Scientists had long suspected frackers caused earthquakes. But when a dead fault unleashed a 5.7 on Oklahoma, it rocked seismology to the core.
At exactly 10:53 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary’s dad custom-built 43 years ago. Their property encompasses 440 acres of rolling grasslands in Prague, Oklahoma (population 2,400), located 50 miles east of Oklahoma City. When I arrive at their ranch almost a year later on a bright fall morning, Joe is wearing a short-sleeve shirt and jeans held up by navy blue suspenders, and is wedged into a metal chair on his front stoop sipping black coffee from a heavy mug. His German shepherd, Shotzie, is curled at his feet. Joe greets me with a crushing handshake—he is 200 pounds, silver-haired and 6 feet tall, with thick forearms and meaty hands—and invites me inside. He served in Vietnam, did two tours totaling nine years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then, in 1984, retired a lieutenant colonel from the US Army to sell real estate and raise cattle. Today, the livestock are gone and Joe calls himself “semiretired” because “we still cut hay in the summers.” Continue reading
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Virtuoso Life | March/April 2013
This is Your Captain Speaking Download PDF
As Virgin Galactic’s passenger flights near, we take a look at the key faces and technologies behind the world’s first commercial spaceline.
When he wants to relax, David Mackay, 55, flies an Extra 300L, a performance aerobatic aircraft, doing vertical rolls and knife-edge spins. This helps him stay sharp at his day job: chief pilot for Virgin Galactic. At the moment, Mackay is flight-testing WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo—the mother ship that will shuttle tourists to 47,000 feet, and the rocket plane that will decouple there and blast into sub-orbital space—and is scheduled to begin flying tourists to space next year. The Scotland native made his first flight in 1977. “I did it with the University Air Squadron, which gave students experience with the armed forces,” he recalls. After graduating, Mackay joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying a Hawker Harrier GR3, a fighter known for its unique ability to take off and land vertically. “I always wanted to be a test pilot,” he says. “So as soon as I had sufficient experience, I applied to test pilot school.” He remained in the RAF as a test pilot until 1995, when he left to fly for Virgin Atlantic, and then, in 2009, joined Virgin Galactic to become the world’s first commercial spacecraft pilot. Continue reading
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It’s Alive | February 18, 2013
Welcome to my new website, which went live at 3:10 PM MST on January 2, 2013. I’m a month-plus late in getting up this post. Sorry. My old site had been virtually unchanged (except for article updates) since it launched sometime in 2001, which speaks to the mad skills of its designer, a former colleague from Wired magazine, who managed to create a simple, fresh look that endured for more than a decade. With my new site, brilliantly envisioned and created by Heather Mann, I tried to embrace a more visual format that works across platforms big and small—including all those schmancy mobile devices. Social-networking doohickeys appear across the site as well. That’s something, right? So click away and please email me if you find bugs, typos, or really hideous things that should never be done on online. Compliments are okay, too.