Operation Carnaval
In my second post for The Atlantic‘s city-specific edition, TheAtlanticCities.com, I look at Rio’s Carnaval festivities in the wake of the Santa Maria nightclub fire tragedy through the popular but problematic lens, “Brazil is not a serious country”: As all eyes turn to Rio for World Cup next year and the 2016 Olympics, the tragedy in Santa … Read more
Rio’s Biggest Prostitution Crackdown in a Generation
In my first post for The Atlantic‘s city-specific edition, TheAtlanticCities.com, I go inside Rio de Janeiro’s recent luxury brothel smackdown: Prostitution is not actually a crime in Brazil. The Ministry of Labor has recognized prostitution as an official occupation since 2002. But as Rio de Janeiro prepares for its turn on the global stage – … Read more
Sex trafficking on Backpage.com: Much ado about (statistically) nothing
In my first post for TechCrunch.com, I go inside Backpage.com’s fight against sex trafficking. It’s bananas. Read Sex Trafficking on Backpage.com: Much Ado About (Statistically) Nothing in TechCrunch.com.
Did I just get plagiarized by the UK’s leading magazine for construction professionals?
In March I wrote a story about the race to build the greenest soccer stadium on the planet in Brazil’s federal capital, Brasilia. I published it in Forbes.com (Greed, Greenwashing and Brazil’s Hail Mary for a Green World Cup) and posted photos of the stadium in progress, courtesy of the architects, on RioChromatic.com (Chasing Green). … Read more
The Other Problem with Sex Trafficking
This is a talk I gave at the Personal Democracy Forum called The Other Problem with Sex Trafficking on 6/12/12 at NYU Skirball Center. I argue that the anti-sex trafficking movement’s war on classified website Backpage.com shows an alarming lack of understanding of how the internet works. The movement is divided between those who fear the internet, like … Read more
The Greenest Soccer Stadium on the Planet
In Brazil, where futebol fanaticism is only matched by the extraordinary lengths the game’s leaders will go to steal money, two young Brazilians are chasing down a different kind of green. Construction delays and corruption charges be damned – if Ian McKee and Vicente Mello have their way, World Cup 2014 will go down as … Read more
Rio’s Big Brother
The biggest surveillance screen in Latin America spans 860 square feet in a new building called the Ops Center that most residents of Rio de Janeiro don’t even know exists. 80 interchangeable digital panels project live video feeds from 450 cameras and three helicopters, plus a dizzying array of tricked-out Google Maps of schools and … Read more
How much of the internet is for porn
In May, I wrote about new book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the exhaustive offspring of two neuroscientists and the largest pile of sex-related data on the planet, my Forbes.com column in a piece called The Internet is for Porn (so let’s talk about it). Then I had the fortune of meeting Ogi Ogas, one … Read more
The death of online dating
I argue today in AdAge that the dating industry as we know it is dying: Despite the undeniable fact that the social era has arrived — mutual friends, followers, first-degree connections, APIs — the dating sites wallow in primordial username soup (so that’s where you’ve been hiding, nycprince03!) and refuse to hook up to the … Read more
Percolating…
My blog is back after a long digital incubation. Thanks @davidu for hooking it up. Words and links coming soon!
