OUTIER
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August
2015
adventure through life differently
YOU CAN DO IT. theLIFElist dream trips daring quests essential skills & exalted states of body & mind
Into the Billion Dollar Mind of
mark zuckerberg down the rabbit hole
The Current Adderal Crisis Affecting Every Generation
jason collins
The Unimaginable Courage to Come Out as the First Gay NBA Player
Dear Readers, Welcome to the first issue of Outlier. This magazine features a wide array of articles, stories, advice, tips, and ideas for living the most unique and adventurous lifestyle. An outlier describes a person that stands apart from others of his or her group, living a life outside of the box. They dare to take chances, explore, reach higher limits, open their minds to above and beyond experiences, and overall, are not afraid to be different. This magazine provides new things to try, new places to travel, new ways to be more involved in the world, and new ways to know what it is truly like to live. The Outlier team is here help you reach your full potential to become the person who can look back on their life in the future and say, ‘I did it all’. We are here to take you out of your comfort zone and prove that: Life is a choice, choose it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is an opportunity, recognize it. Life is possibility, create it. Life is a risk, take it. Life is adventure, dare it. Join on us on this journey, and together we can live a creative life no one else has ever been.
life is either a daring or nothing at all -helen keller
the life list
Presenting 50 dream trips, daring quests, essential skills, & exalted states of body & mind
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by Stephanie Pearson
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adventure through life differently
OUTIER
features
jason collins
The Unimaginable Courage to Come Out as the First Gay NBA Player
21
down the rabbit hole
The Current Adderall Crisis Affecting Every Generation
by Ryan D’Agostino
interview
Into the Billion Dollar Mind of Mark Zuckerberg
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by Steven Levy
table
by Jason Collins with Franz Lidz
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10 Unique Opportunities to Volunteer Abroad by Zahara Heckscher
contents
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17
27
30
01
how to live in the present & ways to slow down your mind by Steve Taylor
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14
adventure through life differently
helping along humanity
10 12 20
a surfer’s ultimate bucketlist
5 of the Best Surf Locations Around the World by Jeff Null
what counts as cheating in relationships of the modern world?
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Tips & Advice
by Laurie Sandell
insects are food
Put Some Chirp in Your Step for A Good Source of Protein by Dana Goodyear
a starbucks customer’s dream come true 16 Indulgent Drinks You Didn’t Know Existed by Brynn Mannino
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OUTIER
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columns
a starbucks customer’s dream come true
indulgent Starbucks drinks you didn’t know existed and how to order them
by Mary Schmich
Mary Theresa Schmich (born November 29, 1953) is an American journalist who has been a columnist for the Chicago Tribune from 1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. She wrote the comic strip Brenda Starr for the last 28 of its 60 years and she wrote the 1997 column, immediately famous, that is usually called “Wear Sunscreen”.
Most people don’t know this, but Starbucks has a secret menu created by dedicated baristas and enthusiastic customers. It’s not listed anywhere, and most of the drinks are region specific. But if you know the recipe–you can ask for them anywhere!
1. creamy dark caramel espresso frappuccino
This one is deliciously rich and thick. It’s different than the preparation of most other frappuc cinos, so be very clear in your requests. For a grande: Get heavy whipping cream (different from whipped cream) blended with just ice and cream base Add 3 pumps of dark caramel sauce to the bottom of the cup, then pour the blended mix into the cup Add a shot of espresso With whipped cream and cookie crumbles on top (when available.)
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2. red velvet frappuccino This one is simple and delicious. Order a half white chocolate mocha, half regular mocha frappuc cino with 2 pumps of raspberry syrup (or 3 for a venti) and top with whipped cream!
3. caramel nut crunch frappuccino
This one is crunchy, nutty, and packed with caramel flavor, but not as strong of a caramel punch as the caramel ribbon crunch frappuc cino. It’s just about as sweet, though.
4. chocolate chip cookie dough frappuccino
This dessert drink is as close to cookie dough as you can get with Starbucks. It’s a bit complicated.
Here’s what you order: Chai creme frappuccino Get it with with soy milk Whipped cream blended in Java chips blended in Cinnamon dolce syrup (3 pumps for venti, 2.5 grande, and 2 for a tall) Chocolate whipped cream on top Mocha drizzle.
5. caramel snickerdoodle macchiato
This one is reminiscent of a caramel covered snickerdoodle cookie. Ask for: an iced soy caramel mac chiato, upside down (this makes it so the flavors blend together better) with vanilla syrup (2 pumps for venti, 1.5 for grande, and 1 for tall) and cinnamon dolce syrup (2 pumps venti, 1.5 grande, and just one for tall).
Order: A vanilla bean frappuc cino Toffee nut syrup (3 pumps venti, 2 pumps grande, 1 pump tall) Caramel syrup (3 pumps venti, 2 pumps grande, 1 pump tall) Add in the caramel ribbon crunch pieces to the bottom of the cup before pouring in the blended mix Add whipped cream and caramel drizzle on top With more caramel crunch pieces on top Enjoy! 01/August 2015
9. nutter butter frappuccino You know, the cookies shaped like peanuts with a peanut butter filling? This tastes oddly similar.
Order: Hazelnut frappucino Blend in a whole banana Cinnamon dolce syrup (3 pumps for a venti, 2 pumps grande, 1 for a tall) Toffee nut syrup (3 pumps for a venti, 2 pumps for grande, and 1 for tall) With or without whipped cream on top–this nutty drink is tasty.
10. spiced apple chai
6. butterbeer frappuccino
As if it came from Hogsmeade, try ordering: Creme frappuc cino base with whole milk Toffee nut syrup (4 pumps for a venti, 3 pumps for grande, and 2 pumps tall) Caramel syrup (4 pumps for a venti, 3 pumps for grande, and 2 pumps tall) Add caramel drizzle Get it with whipped cream if you’d like.
7. peach ring tea
Remember those sugary circular peach ring candies? This reminds us of those. Make sure it’s summertime and refreshers are available. Ask for: Half Valencia orange refresher and half passion tea No water Peach syrup (6 pumps for trenta, 5 for venti, 3 for grande, and 2 for tall).
8. s’mores frappuccino
This popular campfire snack is now in beverage form! Try ordering: A java chip frappuc cino (double chocolate chip works if you’d rather not have the caffeine) Toffee nut syrup (1.5 pumps for venti, 1 pump grande, .5 pumps for a tall) Cinnamon dolce syrup (1.5 pumps for venti, 1 pump grande, .5 pumps for a tall) Whipped cream blended in Whipped cream and cinnamon dolce sprinkles on top.
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This one is delicious and simple to order. You can have it either hot or iced. It tastes like a spiced apple cider, and it’s very refreshing when iced. I’ve actually been able to just ask for an iced/hot apple chai at most places and the baristas know what to do, but I’ve run into a few locations where they’re a little confused. If the barista is unfamiliar, just tell them it’s a chai infusion in apple juice after asking for it hot or iced. That’s how most ring it up on the register, too– although I’ve also seen some do a chai latte minus milk and with apple juice, which will be a bit more expensive. It varies depending on location. Try it with caramel drizzle and whipped cream on top if you’re getting it hot.
11. nutella frappuccino
For the numerous Nutella lovers out there, order: Coffee frappuccino Hazelnut syrup (1.5 pumps for venti, 1 pump for a grande, half a pump for tall) Mocha syrup (3 pumps for venti, 2 pumps for a grande, (1 for tall) Whipped cream blended in Top it with whipped cream and/or caramel if you so desire.
12. snickers frappuccino
Just like the candy bar.
Ask for: A java chip frappuc cino Toffee nut syrup (3 pumps venti, 2 pumps grande, and 1 pump tall) Whipped cream on top Caramel drizzle lining the cup and on top Add mocha drizzle on top for even more chocolate flavor (optional) One drink that sadly lacks a frappuccino version at present, is Thai iced tea. We wrote up a simple stepby-step guide to making a Thai tea concentrate at home which you can then use to flavor your own at-home frappuccinos in a blender!
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16. twix frappuccino
Inspired by the chocolate coated caramel cookie candy bar, this is another drink with a few variations.
13. mint chocolate chip frappuccino
You can try this flavor a number of ways. Our favorite is a mocha frappuccino with peppermint syrup (number of pumps ac cording to your taste) and java chips blended in! You could also try: A green tea frappuccino Peppermint syrup (1-4 pumps, adjust for taste and size) And java chips (1-4 scoops) Alternatively: A green tea frappuc cino Java chips Mocha syrup (3 pumps for a venti, 2 for grande, and 2 for tall) Peppermint syrup (2 pumps for a venti, 1 pump for grande and tall) If the green tea is too strong, just ask for less green tea powder in the future. Find out which combination is your favorite!
Try: Caramel frappuccino Java chips Hazelnut syrup (2 pumps venti, 1.5 pumps grande, 1 pump tall) Whipped cream blended in Coat the cup with caramel sauce And add mocha drizzle on top. Alternatively: Caramel frappuccino Chocolate syrup (adjust amount of pumps with drink size and taste) Whipped cream on top Topped with caramel and mocha drizzles Sprinkled with crunchy caramel pieces (either from their holiday-time brûlée drinks or the summertime caramel ribbon crunch). Or you could even ask for (grande size): Java chip frappuc cino Add a pump of caramel syrup Blend in half of a chocolate caramel pretzel (from their pastry selection if available, and not all locations will blend in whole food items like this) Whipped cream and caramel drizzle on top Add in the rest of your pretzel to stir with.
14. caramel macchiato frappuccino Now you can have your favorite two-layer drink in frappuc cino form (albeit without the two distinct layers). Try: A vanilla bean frappuc cino With 2 shots of espresso Extra caramel drizzle on top, whipped cream optional.
15. turtle frappuccino
Tastes just like the holiday chocolate turtle candies, and is a nice substitute if you’re missing Caribou Coffee’s frozen turtle mocha drink. Here’s what you order: A java chip frappuc cino Toffee nut syrup (3 pumps venti, 2 pumps grande, and 1 pump tall) Whipped cream on top Caramel and mocha drizzles on top.
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01/August 2015
how to live in the present & ways to slow down your mind By Steve Taylor
Steve is a psychology lecturer and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality, including “The Fall” and “Waking From Sleep”. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as ‘an important contribution to the global shift in consciousness happening at the present time.’ His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com. His upcoming book—on the theme of this article—is Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of our Minds.
Sometimes it seems as if life is passing us by. When we were children, time seemed almost endless. Car journeys used to last an eternity and the summer holidays seemed like years stretching before us. But as adults, time seems to speed up at a frightening rate. Christmas and birthday seem to come round quicker each year. We look forward to events – like marriages and holidays – for months only to find that they pass by so quickly that we hardly have time to enjoy them. We never seem to have enough time. We feel stressed by the number of tasks we have to pack into our days and oppressed by the deadlines that loom in front of us. We rush to try to make more time for ourselves, but it just seems to make things worse. Any time we save just seems to fill up with new demands, and even when it really is free, we feel too stressed and agitated to enjoy it fully. However, in my book Making Time, I suggest that we don’t need to feel oppressed by time like this. It is possible for us to slow down time in our lives –and even to transcend time altogether. We don’t have at the mercy of time, because we can control it. Many of us try to make sure we can live for as long as possible by eating good food and exercising, which is sensible. But it’s also possible for us to extend our lives by increasing the amount of time we experience. 01/August 2015
why does time speed up? In order to do this, we first need to look into the question of why time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. The speed of time is largely determined by how many impressions and perceptions our minds take in – the more impressions, the slower time goes. One of the reasons why time goes so slowly for children is because they have a heightened perception of their surroundings, and because they’re experiencing everything for the first time. As a result, they take in a lot more impressions and perceptions, all kinds of details which pass us adults by – tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. But as we get older, we have fewer new experiences, and most of us lose this intensity of perception, as the world becomes a familiar place. We begin to ‘switch off’ to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in progressively fewer perceptions and impressions, and as a result time seems to pass more quickly. However, if we know that familiarity makes time pass faster, then we can slow down time by exposing ourselves to as much new experience as possible, by travelling to new places, giving ourselves new challenges, meeting new people, exposing our minds with new information, hobbies and skills, and so on. One of the pieces of research I did for my book was to go to Manchester Airport and ask returning travellers whether they felt time had gone quickly or slowly, or if they felt they had been away for longer than the period of their holiday. We found that people who went on more adventurous holidays to more unfamiliar places – for example, trekking around India, or a three week tour of Peru – felt that they had been away for a long than the actual time, while people who had returned from tourist complex holidays felt that time had gone quickly. In theory, this is one way in which we could live for ‘longer.’ If a person spends most of their life doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area, doing the same things with the same people in their free time, then it’s inevitable that they experience a swift passage of time. But if you change jobs regularly, regularly travel to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly to you. In this way, it’s possible for a person who dies before the age of, say, 40 to experience more time in their lives than a person who lives a full lifespan.
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mindfulness Perhaps a better alternative to this, though, is to slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful’ of our experience. Mindfulness is a Buddhist term which means giving our whole attention to our experience – to what we are seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling or hearing – rather than to our thoughts. It means living through our senses and our experience rather than through our minds. There are some people who seem to be as affected by familiarity than others, and see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. These are the kind of people – sometimes seen as ec centrics by those around them – who often begin sentences with phrases like ‘Isn’t is strange that…?’ or ‘Have you ever wondered…?’ They’re the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at a beautiful scene of the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon above the rooftops; or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they’ve never them before. Poets and artists often have this kind of ‘child-like’ vision – in fact it’s this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which other people take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. As a result, time probably goes more slowly to them. And in a sense, we can cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful.’ Instead of focusing our attention on the ‘thought-chatter’ in our heads or on tasks or distractions like TV or computer games, we should try to live in the present, to give our attention to the experiences we’re having and to our surroundings. When you’re having a shower in the morning, for example – instead of letting your mind chatter away about the things you’ve got to do today or the things you did last night, try to bring your attention to the here and now, to really be aware of the sensation of the water splashing against and running down your body and the sense of warmth and cleanness you feel. Or on the way home from work on the bus or the train – instead of mulling over all the problems you’ve had to deal with at work or daydreaming about the attractive man you met last night, focus your attention outside you; look at the sky, at the houses and buildings you pass, and be aware of yourself here, walking amongst them.
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living in the now Linear time is an illusion, created by our thoughts. The future and the past don’t exist in reality, just in our heads. We create the future by anticipating it; we create the past by recalling it. And one of our biggest problems as human beings is that we spend so much time immersed in thoughts about the future and the past, rather than living in the present. But through practising mindfulness and meditation we can learn to live in the now. We can turn our attention away from the illusory world of daydreams and memories, and into the wonderful is-ness of our experience and our surroundings. This is like stepping of the train of linear time, and finding ourselves in the midst of an endless panorama of the present.
Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the ‘there and then’ of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more impressions.
Mindfulness also enables us to ‘step outside’ the things we’re doing. In Making Time I put forward several ‘laws’ of psychological time, one of which is ‘time passes quickly in states of absorption.’ This the reason why time goes quickly when we’re having fun – because when we have fun, we’re usually in a state of absorption. It’s why time an evening meal with friends seems so pass so quickly, a wedding day or an exciting sports match. In these situations, you can slow down time by drawing your attention away from the conversations you’re having or the spectacle around you, and just observe. Make an attempt to be ‘mindful’ of your surroundings and your experience, without being absorbed in them.
01/August 2015
tips for slowing down time: 1. meditate regularly
Meditation slows down time in the short term by opening your mind to more perceptions, and in the long term by weakening your ego.
2. practice mindfulness
Mindfulness means leaving in the present moment. It means that giving your whole attention to where you are and what you’re doing, rather than to the thoughts in your head.
3. stop thinking about the future and the past
Don’t see your life as a road, with you walking into the future. See your life as an ocean, that spreads around you in all directions now. There is no before or after, only the present.
4. bring new experiences into your life. This could mean foreign travel, new hobbies and friends. Make sure life doesn’t become too full of routine.
5. avoid spending too much tie in states of absorption
Absorption makes time go faster, so don’t spend too much of your free time in states of ‘passive absorption’, such as watching TV or surfing the internet.
6. don’t wear a watch
Free yourself from ‘time pressure’ by stopping wearing a watch. Just looking at watch can make you feel anxious.
01/August 2015
7. try not to let your life run by clock time.
Begin tasks when you feel the time is right to do them, rather than when the clock tells you to. If you tune in to the natural rhythm of the cosmos – into the Tao, as it’s called in Chinese philosophy – you will know when the right time to do something is.
8. bring yourself ‘outside’ events. If you’re in the midst of an enjoyable oc casion which you feel is going by too quickly, withdraw your attention from it. Become a detached observer of it rather than a participant, and be mindful of all the sights and sounds around you.
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d o w n t h e r a b b i t h o l e The Current Adderall Crisis Affecting Every Generation By Ryan D’Agostino Photos by: Sarah Wilmer
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a surfer’s ultimate bucketlist of the best surf locations around the world
By Jeff Mull Hawaii Editor, SURFER Magazine
when Best For: All surfers, from children getting their first taste of Pacific power to grizzled surf veterans tripping through Latin America in camper vans. In a wave-rich country, Nosara stands out as the surf town par excellence. Warm water, friendly locals, endless beaches, powerful river mouths, long point breaks, and virtually year-round high swells make it a veritable surfing Disneyland—without all the lines and overzealous parents. Located on the coast of a Blue Zone (a place where a large percentage of local people live to a hundred years old or more), Nosara offers the kind of lifestyle that most surfers only dream about. It is a perennial favorite among traveling surfers of all levels for both its waves and relaxed pace of life.
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Costa Rica has two seasons, the dry (December to April) and the rainy (May to November). Surf-wise, the only differences during the dry season are larger crowds and smaller waves on average.
learn
Safari Surf School offers lessons at Playa Guiones, a beach ideally suited to beginners, ac cording to co-owner Tim Marsh. “The waves at Playa Guiones break about a hundred yards offshore and ‘roll’ all the way to the sand’s edge,” he says. “This is ideal so novices can feel comfy knowing we can take them waist-deep and get them on oncoming whitewater waves that roll to the beach.”
nosara, costa rica
eat/drink
Just three minutes from the beach, the Casa Tucan offers great local specialties like fish and meat casados and doubles as a social hub for this small town. Stay around for a drink or two, then move to the KayaSol Surf Hotel for another round.
stay
The Harmony Hotel offers a full spa experience while also being dedicated to sustainable development.
local tip
If you get tired of gentle rollers, head north to Playa Pelada for some volcanic reef action or to the Bocas del Nosara for heavy tubes. But don’t take the power of the waves for granted. 01/August 2015
Best For: Beginner surfers looking for a safe and inviting environment to get their toes wet in the world of surfing
muizenberg, south africa Located in a country known for cold water, heavy waves, and sharks,
Muizenberg, South Africa, is an oasis of gentle rollers, friendly locals, and beachside cafes. And don’t forget about the local wine. “Muizenberg is the best ‘learn to surf’ beach in the world,” says Tim Conibear, founder of Isiqalo, a Cape Town organization that teaches kids from low-income neighborhoods to surf. “The attitude in the water is also super-mellow, with a general ac ceptance of all watercrafts and abilities. For heavier waves, take a walk toward Kalk Bay, where there’s a serious reef. Danger Reef is also a little leftbreaking wave that’s worth a stop.”
when
South Africa receives yearround swell.
learn
The Lifestyle Surf Shop has everything a surfer needs.
eat/drink
Kalk Bay is known for its nightlife and food, especially Olympia Café, which Conibear describes as “a must.”
stay
The Chartfield Guesthouse in neighboring Kalk Bay has great ocean views and is a short walk to restaurants and bars.
local tip
lhe air temperatures may be hotter in the South African summer, but the water temperatures can be colder. Make sure to bring or rent the right wetsuit before you get in the water.
when
September to May
learn
Surf School Santa Cruz: Owner and pro surfer Bud Freitas is part of the current generation of world-renowned Santa Cruz surfers.
eat
After a long surf session at Pleasure Point, Freitas says there is nothing better than a slice or two from Pleasure Pizza, a Santa Cruz institution since 1975.
stay
She West Cliff Inn has ocean-view rooms within spitting distance of Pleasure Point.
Santa Cruz, CA, U.S 01/August 2015
local tip
“It’s not about where you surf, it’s more about the mentality you come with,” says Freitas, commenting on the fearsome reputation of NorCal surfers. “If you want to get waves, be respectful, don’t go rushing out there and thinking you are on every wave. Just take your time, have fun, and be aware of the people around you.” Also, remember that it’s called Steamer Lane, not Steamer’s Lane.
Best For: Santa Cruz is the field trip that all students of surfing, young and old, should take once in their lives. Santa Cruz is a little town with a long surfing history. Its marquee spot, Steamer Lane, was a proving ground for aspiring West Coast big-wave riders in the 1950s. Men like Peter Cole, Ricky Grigg, and the Van Dyke brothers rode giant winter swells here on wooden longboards—sans leashes and wetsuits—in order to practice for the even more powerful waves of Hawaii. It was this penchant for wintertime surfing that lead Jack O’Neill, who lost an eye in an ac cident at the Lane, to develop the modern surfing wetsuit.
You don’t have to brave ship-capsizing surf or risk either of your eyes to enjoy Santa Cruz. Tucked between sea cliffs and redwood forests, this NorCal gem boasts a fantastic surfing museum and 11 surf spots, including the Californian classic, Pleasure Point.
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Best For: The discerning surfer who insists that the wine be just as good as the waves. Biarritz is the only surf town in the world with a royal history. In 1854, Empress Eugénie convinced her husband, Napoleon III, to visit the area. They then bought the land and built a palace on the beach, which made Biarritz one of the hottest resort towns in Europe. Screenwriter Peter Viertel brought France its first surfboard in 1956, when he came to shoot location shots for The Sun Also Rises. Still considered the birthplace of European surfing, Biarritz is a nice combination of French high culture and SoCal surf culture, putting a decidedly surfy spin on the notion of joie de vivre.
Start surfing on La Grande Plage (the Big Beach) in front of the town center. If it gets too crowded, local Cape Breton transplant David Hanguehard recommends checking out surrounding beaches such as La Côtes des Basques, Anglet, and Guethary.
when
September to November.
learn
Bidart Surf Academy
eat/drink
Les 100 Marches, a chic café where you can have champagne with your post-surf baguette
. Biarritz, France
stay
The Hôtel du Palais is Empress Eugénie’s old palace retrofitted as a hotel. If you come to Biarritz, you might as well get the royal treatment.
local tip
Many of the surf shops only sell clothes. Make sure to come prepared.
bundoran, ireland
Best For: The salty surf traveler who doesn’t mind surfing in cold water or rain Ireland, known among surfers as “Europe’s cold-water Indonesia” should be on the bucket list of every surfer. And Bundoran should be the start of any surfing adventure on the Emerald Isle. This centuries-old fishing village catches just about any swell that steamrolls through the North Atlantic and onto a smattering of beaches and reefs that suit different levels of surfers. The water may be cold, but the pubs and locals are always warm, serving up national specialties such as Guinness and oysters to the tune of traditional Irish music.
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“Bundoran is a town with many sides and the real Bundoran can only be found with the help of the locals,” says Pete Craig, surfer and owner of the outfitter Bundoran Surf Co. The main surfing beach is Tullan Strand, but if you want to venture out, ask locals about the surrounding reefs and beaches, which work on a variety of swells.
when
Go September to November, when the water is warm(ish), the tourists have gone home, and the Atlantic is pumping.
stay
A good budget option is to get a room with the Bundoran Surf Co., where you can meet other surfers and plan trips up and down the coast. For a higherend stay, opt for an ocean-view room at Fitzgerald’s Hotel.
local tip
If you buy a round for the locals, which you should, expect to be drinking for the rest of the night.
eat/drink
“The Bridge Bar is a rite of passage for most surfers,” says Craig. Situated overlooking the Peak—Ireland’s most famous reef break—the Bridge is a unique mix of old-school Ireland and surf culture, always with a warm welcome and cold beer.
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“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” John Kabat-Zinn
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collins The Unimaginable Courage to Come Out as the First Gay NBA Player by Jason Collins with Franz Lidz 21
01/August 2015
i’m a 34-year-old nba center. i’m black. and i’m gay. I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand. My journey of self-discovery and selfacknowledgement began in my hometown of Los Angeles and has taken me through two state high school championships, the NCAA Final Four and the Elite Eight, and nine playoffs in 12 NBA seasons. I’ve played for six pro teams and have appeared in two NBA Finals. Ever heard of a parlor game called Three Degrees of Jason Collins? If you’re in the league, and I haven’t been your teammate, I surely have been one of your teammates’ teammates. Or one of your teammates’ teammates’ teammates. Now I’m a free agent, literally and figuratively. I’ve reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful. Why am I coming out now? Well, I started thinking about this in 2011 during the NBA player lockout. I’m a creature of routine. When the regular season ends I immediately dedicate myself to getting
game ready for the opener of the next campaign in the fall. But the lockout wreaked havoc on my habits and forced me to confront who I really am and what I really want. With the season delayed, I trained and worked out. But I lacked the distraction that basketball had always provided. The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. “I’ve known you were gay for years,” she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin. In her presence I ignored my censor button for the first time. She gave me support. The relief I felt was a sweet release. Imagine you’re in the oven, baking. Some of us know and ac cept our sexuality right away and some need more time to cook. I should know -- I baked for 33 years. When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue. I realized I needed to go public when Joe Kennedy, my old roommate at Stanford and now a Massachusetts congressman, told me he had just marched in Boston’s 2012 Gay Pride Parade. I’m seldom jealous of others, but hearing what Joe had done filled me with envy. I was proud of him for participating but angry that as a closeted gay man I couldn’t even cheer my straight friend on as a spectator. If I’d been questioned, I would have concocted half truths. What a shame to have to lie at a celebration of pride. I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore. I want to march for tolerance, ac ceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, “Me, too.”
The recent Boston Marathon bombing reinforced the notion that I shouldn’t wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect. Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully? When I told Joe a few weeks ago that I was gay, he was grateful that I trusted him. He asked me to join him in 2013. We’ll be marching on June 8. No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time. I still had the same sense of humor, I still had the same mannerisms and my friends still had my back. Believe it or not, my family has had bigger shocks. Strange as it seems today, my parents expected only one child in 1978. Me. When I came out (for the first time) the doctors congratulated my mother on her healthy, seven-pound, one-ounce baby boy. “Wait!” said a nurse. “Here comes another one!” The other one, who arrived eight minutes later and three ounces heavier, was Jarron. He’s followed me ever since, to Stanford and to the NBA, and as the everso-slightly older brother I’ve looked out for him. I had a happy childhood in the suburbs of L.A. My parents instilled in us an appreciation of history, art and, most important, Motown. Jarron and I weren’t allowed to listen to rap until we were 12. After our birthday I dashed to Target and bought DJ Quik’s album Quik Is the Name. I memorized every line. It was around this time that I began noticing subtle differences between Jarron and me. Our twinness was no longer synchronized. I couldn’t identify with his attraction to girls.
“imagine you’re in the oven, baking. some of us know and accept our sexuality right away and some need more time to cook. i should know - i baked for 33 years.” ***
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01/August 2015
“i go against the gay stereotype, which is why i think a lot of players will be shocked: that guy is gay?” so much joy. I’m crazy about my nieces and nephew, and I can’t wait to start a family of my own. ***
I feel blessed that I recognized my own attractions. Though I resisted my impulses through high school, I knew that when I was ready I had someone to turn to: my uncle Mark in New York. I knew we could talk without judgment, and we did last summer. Uncle Mark is gay. He and his partner have been in a stable relationship forever. For a confused young boy, I can think of no better role model of love and compassion. I didn’t come out to my brother until last summer. His reaction to my breakfast revelation was radically different from Aunt Teri’s. He was downright astounded. He never suspected. So much for twin telepathy. But by dinner that night, he was full of brotherly love. For the first time in our lives, he wanted to step in and protect me. My maternal grandmother was apprehensive about my plans to come out. She grew up in rural Louisiana and witnessed the horrors of segregation. During the civil rights movement she saw great bravery play out amid the ugliest aspects of humanity. She worries that I am opening myself up to prejudice and hatred. I explained to her that in a way, my coming out is preemptive. I shouldn’t have to live under the threat of being outed. The announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ’s. The hardest part of this is the realization that my entire family will be affected. But my relatives have told me repeatedly that as long as I’m happy, they’re there for me. I watch as my brother and friends from college start their own families. Changing diapers is a lot of work, but children bring 01/August 2015
I’m from a close-knit family. My parents instilled Christian values in me. They taught Sunday school, and I enjoyed lending a hand. I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding. On family trips, my parents made a point to expose us to new things, religious and cultural. In Utah, we visited the Mormon Salt Lake Temple. In Atlanta, the house of Martin Luther King Jr. That early exposure to otherness made me the guy who ac cepts everyone unconditionally. I’m learning to embrace the puzzle that is me. After I was traded by the Celtics to Washington in February, I took a detour to the Dr. King memorial. I was inspired and humbled. I celebrate being an AfricanAmerican and the hardships of the past that still resonate today. But I don’t let my race define me any more than I want my sexual orientation to. I don’t want to be labeled, and I can’t let someone else’s label define me.
On the court I graciously ac cept one label sometimes bestowed on me: “the pro’s pro.” I got that handle because of my fearlessness and my commitment to my teammates. I take charges and I foul -- that’s been my forte. In fact, during the 2004-05 season my 322 personals led the NBA. I enter the court knowing I have six hard fouls to give. I set picks with my 7-foot, 255-pound body to get guys like Jason Kidd, John Wall and Paul Pierce open. I sacrifice myself for other players. I look out for teammates as I would my kid brother. I’m not afraid to take on any opponent. I love playing against the best. Though Shaquille O’Neal is a Hall of Famer, I never shirked from the challenge of trying to frustrate the heck out of him. (Note to Shaq: My flopping has nothing to do with
being gay.) My mouthpiece is in, and my wrists are taped. Go ahead, take a swing -I’ll get up. I hate to say it, and I’m not proud of it, but I once fouled a player so hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher. I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay? But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft? Who knows? That’s something for a psychologist to unravel. My motivations, like my contributions, don’t show up in box scores, and frankly I don’t care about stats. Winning is what counts. I want to be evaluated as a team player. Loyalty to my team is the real reason I didn’t come out sooner. When I signed a free-agent contract with Boston last July, I decided to commit myself to the Celtics and not let my personal life become a distraction. When I was traded to the Wizards, the political significance of coming out sunk in. I was ready to open up to the press, but I had to wait until the season was over. A college classmate tried to persuade me to come out then and there. But I couldn’t yet. My one small gesture of solidarity was to wear jersey number 98 with the Celtics and then the Wizards. The number has great significance to the gay community. One of the most notorious antigay hate crimes oc curred in 1998. Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, was kidnapped, tortured and lashed to a prairie fence. He died five days after he was finally found. That same year the Trevor Project was founded. This amazing organization provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention to kids struggling with their sexual identity. Trust me, I know that struggle. I’ve struggled with some insane logic. When I put on my jersey I was making a statement to myself, my family and my friends. The strain of hiding my sexuality became almost unbearable in March, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against same-sex marriage. Less than three
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miles from my apartment, nine jurists argued about my happiness and my future. Here was my chance to be heard, and I couldn’t say a thing. I didn’t want to answer questions and draw attention to myself. Not while I was still playing. I’m glad I’m coming out in 2013 rather than 2003. The climate has shifted; public opinion has shifted. And yet we still have so much farther to go. Everyone is terrified of the unknown, but most of us don’t want to return to a time when minorities were openly discriminated against. I’m impressed with the straight pro athletes who have spoken up so far -- Chris Kluwe, Brendon Ayanbadejo. The more people who speak out, the better, gay or straight. It starts with President Obama’s mentioning the 1969 Stonewall riots, which launched the gay rights movement, during his second inaugural address. And it extends to the grade-school teacher who encourages her students to ac cept the things that make us different. *** By its nature, my double life has kept me from getting close to any of my teammates. Early in my career I worked hard at acting straight, but as I got more comfortable in my straight mask it required less effort. In recent days, though, little has separated “mask on, mask off.” Personally, I don’t like to dwell in someone else’s private life, and I hope players and coaches show me the same respect. When I’m with my team I’m all about working hard and winning games. A good teammate supports you no matter what. I’ve been asked how other players will respond to my announcement. The simple answer is, I have no idea. I’m a pragmatist. I hope for the best, but plan for the worst. The biggest concern seems to be that gay players will behave unprofessionally in the locker room. Believe me, I’ve taken plenty of showers in 12 seasons. My behavior wasn’t an issue before, and it won’t be one now. My conduct won’t change. I still abide by the adage, “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.” I’m still a model of discretion.
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As I write this, I haven’t come out to anyone in the NBA. I’m not privy to what other players say about me. Maybe Mike Miller, my old teammate in Memphis, will recall the time I dropped by his house in Florida and say, “I enjoyed being his teammate, and I sold him a dog.” I hope players swap stories like that. Maybe they’ll talk about my character and what kind of person I am. As far as the reaction of fans, I don’t mind if they heckle me. I’ve been booed before. There have been times when I’ve wanted to boo myself. But a lot of ill feelings can be cured by winning. I’m a veteran, and I’ve earned the right to be heard. I’ll lead by example and show that gay players are no different from straight ones. I’m not the loudest person in the room, but I’ll speak up when something isn’t right. And try to make everyone laugh. I’ve never sought the spotlight. Though I’m coming out to the world, I intend to guard my privacy. I’m making this blanket statement in part to keep rumors and misunderstandings at bay. I hope fans will respect me for raising my hand. And I hope teammates will remember that I’ve never been an in-your-face kind of guy. All you need to know is that I’m single. I see no need to delve into specifics. Look at what happened in the military when the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy was repealed. Critics of the repeal were sure that our miitary members would devastate morale and destroy civilization. But a new study conducted by scholars from every branch of the armed forces except the Coast Guard concluded that “cohesion did not decline after the new policy of open service was put into place. In fact, greater openness and honesty resulting from repeal seem to have promoted increased understanding, respect and ac ceptance.”
The same goes for sports. Doc Rivers, my coach on the Celtics, says, “If you want to go quickly, go by yourself -- if you want to go farther, go in a group.” I want people to pull together and push ahead. Openness may not completely disarm prejudice, but it’s a good place to start. It all comes down to education. I’ll sit down with any player who’s uneasy about my coming out. Being gay is not a choice. This is the tough road and at times the lonely road. Former players like Tim Hardaway, who said “I hate gay people” (and then became a supporter of gay rights), fuel homophobia. Tim is an adult. He’s entitled to his opinion. God bless America. Still, if I’m up against an intolerant player, I’ll set a pretty hard pick on him. And then move on. The most you can do is stand up for what you believe in. I’m much happier since coming out to my friends and family. Being genuine and honest makes me happy. I’m glad I can stop hiding and refocus on my 13th NBA season. I’ve been running through the Santa Monica Mountains in a 30-pound vest with Shadow, the German shepherd I got from Mike Miller. In the pros, the older you get, the better shape you must be in. Next season a few more eyeballs are likely to be on me. That only motivates me to work harder. Some people insist they’ve never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who’s gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who’s out.
“I’ve been asked how other players will respond to my announcement. The simple answer is, I have no idea. I’m a pragmatist. I hope for the best but plan for the worst.” 01/August 2015
01/August 2015
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what counts as cheating in the relationships of the modern world? tips & advice
Laurie Sandell has written for Esquire, GQ, Glamour, and InStyle, among others, and has contributed cartoons to New York, Glamour, and the Wall Street Journal. Her first book, the graphic memoir The Impostor’s Daughter--about her own experiences with her ec centric, secretive father--was nominated for a 2009 Eisner Award. She splits her time between Los Angeles, California, and Brooklyn, New York. By Laurie Sandell
Guys are sending flirty texts, friending their exes on Facebook, getting super close to that girl at work. When does his behavior(and—hello!— yours) cross the line into not-cool territory? We asked Glamour readers across the country to weigh in—and boy, did you have opinions! Sad but true: People have always cheated (just take a look at Mad Men—or the Bible). But throw in e-mail, text messaging and Facebook, and these days you have a lot more opportunities to cheat, plus even more confusion about what cheating actually is. Glamour decided to take the mystery out of the equation, asking women to contribute their most intimate—and iffy— might’ve-been-cheating stories so readers could vote on what crosses the line. Read on, but don’t be surprised if you end up feeling some old-fashioned moral outrage!
1. Is it cheating if the relationship isn’t official?
“When I was in college, I dated a guy for two years who said he wasn’t comfortable with the ‘boyfriend’ label. Among friends, I called him my ‘significant other,’ but when I was with him, I just went with the flow and assumed we were exclusive. He was the first guy I slept with, the first I brought home to my parents, the one I spent every holiday and birthday with. Then he started fooling around with my best friend’s ¬roommate, and a month later they were a couple. I confronted him, and he said he didn’t think we were officially ‘together,’ so it wasn’t cheating. He also felt justified because she and I weren’t close friends! Everybody knew but me—that’s what hurt the most.” —NICOLE,* 22, New York City
Is this cheating? YES: 75% NO: 25%
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2. Is it cheating to go on a “pseudodate”?
“Once, I was seated next to a handsome stranger on a plane. He’d been bumped from first class, where he usually sat, which is why he was flying coach. Turned out he was a famous agent, owned a fabulous art collection, was smart and funny, and, to top it all off, he was single. (I’d been dating someone for five years.) When we landed, he asked for my number and called me at my hotel that very night, inviting me to a private party for one of my favorite actors. As we worked the room, I pictured the fabulous life I could have with him: I’d be rich and connected. I’d be taken care of, for once (my boyfriend is a musician). But in the end, I felt too guilty to continue the ‘relationship,’ and stopped returning his calls.” — DIANA, 32, Los Angeles
Was she cheating? YES: 45% NO: 55%
01/August 2015
4. Is a girl kissing another straight girl cheating? Is this cheating? YES: 37% NO: 63%
3. Is it cheating if you just sleep in the same bed?
“When I was a senior in college, I had a boyfriend of three years, but sometimes my friend Nate would come over and spend the night…in my bed. We never hooked up or even really touched; we just talked and fell asleep next to each other. One parents’ weekend, my dad caught us in bed together and asked me if I was going to tell my boyfriend about it. I said no, because I didn’t think it was cheating.” —JESSICA, 26, Boston
Is this cheating? YES: 32% NO: 68%
01/August 2015
What if she’d done it more than once? YES: 72% NO: 28%
What if they’d cuddled? YES: 70% NO: 30%
“I’d been dating my boyfriend for a year and a half when I flew to L.A. to go to a girlfriend’s bachelorette party. We got dressed up, rented a limo and went out to a bunch of bars. Along the way, we picked up a few guys, who later bought us tons of drinks. As we got more and more drunk, the girls got flirtier with each other, and the guys were egging us on. Before I knew it, I was lip-locked with a girl in the back of the limo—for a while! At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal, but when I saw my boyfriend back in Chicago, I felt really bad. Even though he’d often joked that he found it hot when women made out with each other, I decided not to tell him about the wild night I’d had.” — JENNIFER, 32, Chicago
Was he cheating? YES: 80% NO: 20%
5. Is it cheating to
exchange steamy Facebook messages? “Out with friends one night, I met a cute guy who was wearing a wedding ring. We hit it off, and eventually everyone left the bar except us—and that’s when we admitted our attraction to each other. He said he’d been married less than a year. When we left the bar, I gave him a sad goodbye kiss on the mouth. Four days later he sent me a message on Facebook, and for a week, he sent me beautiful love messages. He said his feelings were too intense to ignore. I broke it off—I knew I couldn’t survive it, emotionally. Then he sent me a CD full of the most stunning songs, which I listened to twice, crying. After that, I put it away and never made contact with him again!” —REGINA, 32, New York City
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6. Is it cheating to
have a ‘work spouse’? “There’s a guy at work who’s my best friend: We talk about everything from work to sex to the future. We go out to lunch, sit side by side in meetings and sometimes even work out together! We’re attracted to each other and have joked about hooking up—and I think he actually would—but I’ve never given him the opportunity to cross that line. He’s married with children! I do have a boyfriend, and he’s everything to me, but he lives across the country and loves his job— so until he’s ready to move East, I need someone I can bond with on a daily basis.” —SUSAN, 36, Philadelphia
Is this cheating? YES: 27% NO: 73%
7. Is getting a private dance at a strip club cheating?
Is this cheating? YES: 16% NO: 84%
“My boyfriend and I have a great, honest and, in my humble opinion, sexually satisfying relationship. Recently when he went to a bachelor party, I joked about him getting lap dances, and he said he wouldn’t. It wasn’t like I forbade him—he said he just wasn’t into that stuff. When he got home, I made a crack about the lap dance and could tell by the look on his face that he’d had one. I was pretty devastated. He didn’t understand why I was so angry, since it was ‘normal’ bachelor-party behavior. It wasn’t that he got the lap dance (though it’s not an image I’ve enjoyed having in my head); it’s that he said he wouldn’t—and did it anyway.” —JENNY, 34, Portland, Ore.
8. Is it cheating if
your boyfriend fools around with his gay best friend?
Is this cheating? YES: 95% NO: 5% What if it had been with a girl? YES: 99% NO: 1%
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“Several years ago I was in a long-term relationship. My boyfriend had a close gay friend who was obviously in love with him. One night my boyfriend came home wasted and mentioned, as if it were no big deal, that he’d let his friend go down on him. He said the guy begged him all the time, and that since he was drunk and didn’t really care, he’d let him. He couldn’t believe I was upset! He said he was doing it just to be nice, to ‘throw the dog a bone,’ and that his former girlfriend had been fine when he’d done it before. We had a huge fight about it. He thought I was being uptight, but promised that he’d never do it again. I forbade him to see his friend, and as far as I know, he only saw him a couple more times while we were together.” —JOY, 28, Las Vegas
01/August 2015
insects are food put some chirp in your step for a good source of protein
By Dana Goodyear Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, teaches at the University of Southern California and is the author of two collections of poetry. Her nonfiction début, “Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture”.
cricket recipes preparation of crickets for any recipe:
It is important to note that crickets should only be purchased from reliable sources. Crickets should be treated much in the same manner as any other raw food, in particular seafood. In other words it is best to keep crickets fresh as possible. Prior to preparing your crickets for a meal place them inside a plastic container or storage bag and keep them in the refrigerator at least for an hour or until you are ready to use them. This will not kill the crickets, but rather slow down their metabolism, inducing a state of hypothermia, in other words, prohibiting their movement when removed from container. If you prefer however, as many people do, feel free to place them inside the freezer for an hour or two as this will definitely kill them, guaranteeing their immobility. After removing from refrigerator or freezer, place them in a pot of boiling water sized to hold the specific amount of crickets you’re using. Add a few pinches of salt. Boil for about two minutes. This ensures cleanliness. Once boiled, remove from water and let cool. Crickets at this time can be placed in storage bags and kept in the freezer or used right away for any number of recipes. All crickets should be prepared in this manner prior to eating.
dry roasted crickets
Served as a snack for any number of persons
ingredients:
25 – 50 live crickets – or however many you wish to cook/serve
directions:
Salt, or any preferred seasoning that can be shaken or sprinkled onto crickets after roasting. Next, preheat oven to 200 degrees. Arrange the crickets on a cookie sheet, making sure none of them overlap. Proceed to bake at low temperature for about 60 minutes or until the crickets are completely dry or dry enough for personal taste. Open up oven at the 45-minute mark and test a cricket to see if it’s dry enough by crushing with a spoon against a hard surface or if you prefer, between your fingers. The crickets should crush somewhat easily. If not place them back inside oven until crisp. Once roasted and cooled down, place a few crickets between your palms and carefully roll them breaking off legs and antennae in the process. This ensures clean and crisp crickets without legs or antennae getting in the way of. Season them with salt, Kosher salt, sea salt, smoked salt or whatever sort of seasoning you wish. They are very good and healthy to eat as a roasted snack. Eat them on the spot or place them back into the freezer for future use. 01/August 2015
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hoppin’ good™ cricket fried rice Serves 4 – 6
Hoppin’ Good™ Banana Oat Cricket Muffins
ingredients:
ingredients:
4 cups cold cooked brown rice 1 ½ cups of roasted crickets (about 3 – 4 dozen) 1 cup chopped scallions ½ cup cooked corn kernels 2 large eggs 1 teaspoon Kosher salt Powdered ginger to taste Powdered coriander to taste Garlic powder to taste 1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper, or to taste 4 tablespoons oil for stir-frying, or as needed 1 ½ tablespoons light soy sauce or oyster sauce, as desired
directions:
Wash and finely chop scallions. Lightly beat the eggs with salt, ginger, garlic powder, coriander and pepper. Heat a wok or frying pan and add 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil is hot, add the eggs. Cook, stirring, until they are lightly scrambled but not too dry. Remove the eggs and wipe clean the wok or frying pan. Add 2 tablespoons of oil. Add rice. Stir-fry for a few minutes, using wooden spoon to break it apart. Add crickets. Add scallions. Stir in soy sauce or oyster sauce as desired. Continue stirring for a few more minutes. When the rice is heated through, add the scrambled egg back into the pan. Mix thoroughly. Stir in corn kernels. Serve hot. This dish goes great with any other dish or appetizer, i.e., cooked greens, egg rolls, dumplings, etc.
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¼ cup warm virgin coconut oil 2 eggs 2 very ripe bananas ½ cup agave nectar ¼ cup organic brown sugar or cane sugar 1 cup cricket flour (flour containing crushed crickets) ½ cup whole wheat pastry flour 1 cup rolled oats ½ cup finely chopped crickets (legs and antennae removed) ½ cup chopped unsalted sunflower seeds (shelled) 1 teaspoon baking soda ¾ teaspoon baking powder pinch of salt
directions:
Mash bananas. Mix in eggs, agave nectar, coconut oil, and brown sugar or cane sugar. In a separate bowl, combine flours, baking soda, baking powder, oats, and a pinch of salt. Incorporate all ingredients together, then add in sunflower seeds (do not over-mix). Spoon batter into a paper lined muffin tray, filling a little more than halfway. Top with oats and chopped seeds. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until toothpick runs clean when poked inside the middle of one muffin. Makes 16 large muffins or about 24 small muffins, depending on how deep you fill your muffin trays with batter.
01/August 2015
chocolate chirp cookies Makes a dozen or so cookies
ingredients:
2 ¼ cups cricket flour 1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. salt 1 cup butter, softened ¾ cup sugar ¾ cup brown sugar 1 tsp. vanilla 2 eggs 1 12-ounce pkg. chocolate chips ½ cup dry-roasted chopped crickets
directions:
chocolate covered crickets ingredients:
1 cup roasted crickets (see recipe for Dry Roasted Crickets) 1 cup chocolate chips
directions:
Melt the chocolate chips ac cording to packaging. Drop in a handful of crickets, stirring them around. Scoop them out with a spoon, and place them on wax paper, keeping them apart from one another. Continue until all the crickets are covered. The chocolate will harden overnight but if you prefer you can freeze them for about an hour and they will be ready to eat shortly thereafter. Once hardened, the crickets can be stored in a container for future use.
tips: For an extra treat and visual experience, place chocolate covered crickets atop broken bits of white chocolate chunks or dip chocolate covered crickets in powdered chocolate and serve chilled.
Preheat oven to 375 deg F. In saucepan heat 1 12-ounce pkg. chocolate chips until melted. Or melt in small bowl in microwave. Dip dry-roasted crickets into mixture and lay flat on drying pan or plate. In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt; set aside. In large bowl, combine butter, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla; beat until creamy. Beat in eggs. Gradually add cricket flour mixture and mix well. Stir in chocolate covered crickets. Drop by rounded measuring teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes.
cranberry oatmeal cricket cookies Makes 30 to 40 cookies
ingredients:
1 cup cranberries, rinsed 1 ¾ cups old-fashioned rolled oats 1 cup all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt 1 ¼ sticks unsalted butter, softened ½ cup raw Turbinado sugar ½ cup packed light brown sugar 1 large egg ½ teaspoon vanilla ½ cup dry roasted chopped crickets
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directions:
Preheat oven to 325°F (160°C.) Lightly grease baking sheets. In a bowl, stir together oats, flour, baking soda, and salt; set aside. In a separate bowl, beat together butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar with an electric mixer until light and airy. Add egg and vanilla and beat well. Add oat mixture, crickets and cranberries and mix until well combined. Place dough in spoonfuls, 2 inches apart onto baking sheets. Bake cookies in upper and lower thirds of oven, switching position of sheets halfway. Bake until golden, about 12 minutes total. Transfer to racks to cool.
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into the
billion
dollar mind of
mark zuckerberg by: steven levy
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01/August 2015
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t usually observe
sentimental anniversaries. This year he’s confronted by three of them. On Feb. 4, Facebook (FB), the company he co-founded in a Harvard University dorm, turns 10 years old. The prodigy himself turns 30 in May. It’s also been a decade since his first date with Priscilla Chan, now his wife, whom he first met in line for the bathroom at a Harvard fraternity party. So last fall, Zuckerberg began typing up dozens of pages of musings, often pecking out the words on his phone. He shaped his thoughts into 3-, 5-, and 10-year plans. He also gave himself a specific goal for 2014. He’s fond of annual challenges, and in previous years he’s vowed to learn Mandarin (2010), to eat only animals he slaughtered himself (2011), and to meet someone new each day (2013). For this year he intends to write at least one wellconsidered thank-you note every day, via e-mail or handwritten letter. “It’s important for me, because I’m a really critical person,” he says at Facebook’s sprawling corporate campus in Menlo Park, Calif. “I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are, or the level of service that we’re providing for people, or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.” He’s still unnaturally boyish and is wearing his customary uniform: hoodie, gray T-shirt, and jeans. No Adidas shower sandals, though; in what could be construed as a sign of creeping maturity, he’s wearing black Nike sneakers. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman and chief executive officer, has many reasons to be grateful. His social network is used by 1.23 billion people around the world. The company is worth around $135 billion and will probably become the fastest in history to reach $150 billion. Its recent financial results have impressed Wall Street, in part with the suc cess of its shift to mobile phones. In the fourth-quarter earnings report it filed on Jan. 29, Facebook disclosed that for the first time sales from ads on mobile phones and tablets exceeded revenue from traditional PCs. The shift to mobile was “not as quick as it should have been,” Zuckerberg says, but “one of the things that characterizes our company is that we are pretty strong-willed.” Facebook’s challenge is to keep growing. With almost half the world’s Internetconnected population using the service, the company is facing the immutable law of large numbers and simply can’t keep adding users at its previously torrid rate. 01/August 2015
At the same time, Facebook must defend its highly profitable business against several threatening trends. Internet users—particularly young ones—crave different kinds of online experiences and new ways of connecting with one another. Many lead online lives that begin and end without Facebook. Rivals such as Twitter (TWTR) and Snapchat, with their embrace of pseudonyms and different ways of sharing publicly and privately, have grown up outside the once-inexorable Facebook ecosystem. Silicon Valley’s smartest product developers, who used to make games and other diversions that lived on Facebook, are instead applying their talents to creating apps that compete with it. “No one individually has quite yet displaced Facebook,” says Keith Rabois, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. “But as more and more people choose another social platform as their primary hub, it’s a real problem. They could be losing one segment at a time.” Zuckerberg says companies often lose their way during major transitions. His company hasn’t, he says, so “we’re really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big things that we want to do.” Early in 2012, Zuckerberg called an all-hands meeting and dramatically declared that the company would be “mobile first.” He then reinforced that focus by unceremoniously ending any meeting where employees began their presentations talking about computers rather than smartphones. And his threeyear plan remains all about strengthening Facebook’s presence in mobile. “Mark had to learn how to run a mobile-first company in the last two years, which meant thinking differently about how he ran teams, how products were built, and which engineering skills we needed,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “He made that shift so quickly.” The process hasn’t been entirely smooth. Facebook contemplated building its own smartphones and decided against it. Last year it introduced software called Facebook Home to customize devices running Google’s (GOOG) Android software, which flopped. Now it’s concentrating on a third approach: standalone apps, lots of them. On Jan. 30, Facebook plans to release the first in a series of mobile apps as part of an initiative it’s calling Facebook Creative Labs. Many of these apps will have their own brands and distinct styles of sharing. The first, called Paper, looks nothing at all like a Facebook product. If Facebook is the Internet’s social newspaper, Paper strives to be its magazine: photos, friend updates,
and shared articles show up in an imageheavy, uncluttered way. The stories are picked and ordered based largely on how much they are shared and “liked” on Facebook, with a team of human editors ensuring that the content comes from the right sources. The app includes a few neat interface tricks such as a panoramic mode, which lets users navigate to different sections of a photograph by tilting their device in different directions. “We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future,” Zuckerberg says. In other words, the future of Facebook may not rest entirely on Facebook itself. The company’s first significant move toward becoming a diversified app power was buying Instagram. Facebook snapped up the photo-sharing app for $1 billion in April 2012, and the marriage appears to be a happy one. Ac cording to a recent study by Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Instagram users visit the service on a daily basis. It’s the second-highest engagement rate of any social network, after Facebook. Last year, Facebook bid $3 billion to buy Snapchat, the trendy social networking app where photographs vanish after a few seconds. But Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, a 23-year-old Stanford University dropout, seems to view Facebook as Zuckerberg himself once regarded Google, and as Google’s founders once saw Microsoft (MSFT): as an establishment power to be combatted and oc casionally mocked. Spiegel rejected the entreaty and posted screen shots of e-mail conversations with Zuckerberg on Twitter.
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Asked about having his private messages made public, Zuckerberg seems pensive, not upset. “Oh, I don’t know, that’s probably not what I would have done,” he says, and then suggests that Spiegel’s move was a forgivable error in judgment. “Whenever I speak to entrepreneurs, they always ask me what mistakes [they] should try not to make. I actually think that the thing is, you’re just going to mess up all this stuff, and we have [as well].” Although Snapchat doesn’t reveal how many users it has, some reports suggest that it, not Facebook, is the social network to beat among teenagers; Snapchat already handles more photos every day than Facebook. IStrategy Labs, a social media consulting firm, recently reported that Facebook’s teenage user base has fallen 25 percent since 2011. Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, question the ac curacy of such reports and note that a majority of teens still use Facebook every day, at a rate unmatched by any rival. That’s not to say Zuckerberg and his team are dismissive. “Generally, when a product is very suc cessful, we spent a lot of time talking about why,” says Bret Taylor, Facebook’s former chief technology officer,
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who left the company in 2012 to form his own startup creating word processing tools for mobile phones. “Mark is very willing to recognize the strengths in other products and the flaws in Facebook.” Working out those flaws and improving Facebook got harder the more suc cessful the social network became. When a fifth or so of the human species uses your product, changing it is no small matter. Last spring the company unveiled a revamped News Feed, the stream of status updates, news articles, and photos that make up the social network’s central artery of information. Although the changes made their way into the mobile app first, Facebook never fully rolled them out onto desktop computers, because users who tested it disliked it. Over the years the company has also introduced such features as a question-and-answer service, a “check-in” tool that allowed users to broadcast physical locations to their friends, and a digital currency called Facebook Credits. They’ve all been stuffed into the primary social network and then largely ignored by Facebook’s members. Facebook has had suc cess recently with one homegrown standalone app: Facebook
Messenger, which was updated last year and vastly increased the use of the social network’s chat service. It’s now the 12thmost-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store, ahead of the main Facebook app itself. Facebook has had messaging capability for a while, but it was just another feature buried in a great big social network. It used to be “behind two taps, every single time you want to use it,” says Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president for product and one of Zuckerberg’s longtime confidants. “[That] was a huge, huge amount of friction to add.” In December the company gathered its engineers for a brainstorming and coding session to kick off Facebook Creative Labs. Most such “hackathons” last a day; this one went on for three, and participants were told to prepare for it a month and a half in advance. Mike Vernal, a vice president for engineering, calls it the most energetic hackathon he’s seen at the company. Zuckerberg says about 40 ideas emerged from the event. While he won’t share them, he says as many as half a dozen could be introduced this year under the Creative Labs umbrella and suggests one could be tailored for Facebook Groups, an often 01/August 2015
overlooked feature of the social network that allows clusters of members to communicate privately. One thing about some of the new apps that will come as a shock to anyone familiar with Facebook: Users will be able to log in anonymously. That’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who once told David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” At the time of Facebook’s founding, there was no such thing as real identity online. Facebook became the first place where people met one another as themselves, and the company was stubborn about asking users to sign in and share material with their own names. A Facebook ac count became a sort of passport to the rest of the Web, and with its suc cess came new problems. No teenager wants to share insane party pics with a group of friends that may include his or her parents and teachers. And dissidents in parts of the world where speaking freely can be incriminating avoided the service in favor of alternatives such as Twitter, where real names are optional. Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. “I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,” he says. “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn’t require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. “It’s definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later,” he says. “I think that’s good.” Facebook executives seem eager to manage expectations around these apps, including Paper, saying they’re tailored for smaller audiences and won’t achieve blockbuster, billion-user suc cess anytime soon. This caution may stem from flops such as Facebook Home and the revamped News Feed, which were both heavily promoted, as well as Poke, a Snapchat-like app that Facebook introduced a few years ago and went nowhere. Zuckerberg says Poke was “more of a joke. A few people built it as a hackathon thing, and we made one release and then just kind of abandoned it and haven’t touched it since.” Facebook also doesn’t need to replicate its massive success with these new apps. It’s one of 01/August 2015
most profitable companies in the world: In the most recent quarter, its net income was $780 million and operating margins were 56 percent, excluding certain ac counting items. The company is sitting on $11.45 billion in cash. You can afford to do a lot of experimentation and make a lot of mistakes with that kind of money. Over five years, Zuckerberg wants Facebook to become more intuitive and to solve problems that in some cases users don’t even know they have. Between 5 percent and 10 percent of posts on Facebook involve users posing questions to their friends, such as requests for the names for a good local dentist, or the best Indian restaurant. The company, he says, should do better at harvesting all that data to provide answers. It’s going to be an enormous challenge. Zuckerberg is steering his company right into the domain of Google, which reliably answers most questions online and is one of the few companies with the pockets and will to outspend anyone trying to push the technological boundaries of search. For example, Google recently outmaneuvered Facebook in acquiring DeepMind Technologies, a British artificial intelligence company working on ways to understand and answer complex queries. Last year, Facebook introduced a Googleesque tool called Graph Search. It’s been a disappointment. When it’s suggested that Graph Search works about half the time, Zuckerberg says that’s being generous. Vernal, the engineering vice president, says Graph Search was the last major product designed primarily for desktop computers. It’s now being redesigned for phones. He cites the opportunity to use a user’s location to deliver results relevant to where they are. If a user is traveling in New Zealand, for example, Facebook should serve up previous updates and insights from Facebook members who have visited Auckland. Vernal says harvesting all this data, amid some trillion status updates posted throughout Facebook’s history, is “a multiyear journey.” Zuckerberg also has some aggressive personal goals. He’s ac celerating his philanthropy and is far beyond where tech titans such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were at a similar age. His net worth exceeds $24 billion, ranking him the 26th-wealthiest person in the world, ac cording to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is also the youngest of the top 150. Zuckerberg and Chan recently donated $1 billion to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a local organization that gives grants to nonprofits in education, health, and the environment. In January they separately pledged $5 million to a family health center in the disadvantaged Silicon
Valley community of East Palo Alto. As for a family of his own, Zuckerberg says his wife is ready and he is not. “I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them,” he says. “That’s the whole point.”
the interview
As caretaker of a service with a billion users, Mark Zuckerberg is used to sparking protest. Any time his company releases a new product, adjusts a privacy setting, or even tweaks the design, thousands of outraged Facebookers take to the Web to decry the change. So Zuckerberg can expect to hear sirens today, as he announces Home, Facebook’s most dramatic response to the pivot from desktop and web to phones and tablets. New paradigms like mobile can be the ill winds that blow down card-houses of tech dominance, and to maintain its status as the alpha social network, Facebook must get this right. First, what it’s not: Home isn’t the longrumored Facebook Phone. That was always a red herring. Instead, Home turns your phone into a Facebook device. Even with the lock screen on, a photo stream of your friends’ activities fills the screen. Updates appear on your home screen, too. What’s more, Home makes Facebook the primary means of communication on your device. The company’s messaging software merges with SMS, and you can continue using its “chat heads” to text while inside another app. Zuckerberg believes that the social network plays too big a role in its users lives to be drowned out by a vast sea of apps. “Apps aren’t the center of the world,” he says. “People are.” Home does put people—your people— front and center. And Zuckerberg is probably hoping that most users choose it over the standard Facebook app. The catch is that not everyone can participate, even if they want to. At launch, Home is limited to a few Android phones; iPhone users are shut out. Apple enforces its own look and feel, and allowing a developer to take over the lockdown screen is currently unimaginable. But there are plenty of things that were once unimaginable that have come to pass. One of them is the personal evolution of Facebook’s CEO. Ac counts of Zuckerberg’s early years as a founder paint him as callow. But in recent appearances—and interviews like this one—he has been articulate, engaging, and at ease. Clearly Zuckerberg is at home at Facebook. Now his task is to make us all feel that way.
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“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. it was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.� - Mark Zuckerberg
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Q: What led to your building Facebook Home? A: Facebook oc cupies an interesting space in mobile. We’re not an operating system, but we’re not just an app either. Facebook ac counts for 23 percent of the time people spend on smartphones. The next-biggest ones are Instagram and Google Maps, which are each at 3 percent. For the past 18 months, we spent our efforts building good versions of Facebook’s mobile apps. But the design was still very close to what we have on the desktop. We knew that we could do better.
Q: Why not just build a phone? A: I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.
Q: It’s only available on Android phones. Isn’t it ironic that your mobile strategy is now tied to Google’s operating system? A: We have a pretty good partnership with Apple, but they want to own the whole experience themselves. There aren’t a lot of bridges between us and Google, but we are aligned with their open philosophy.
Q: So do you think in, say, two years you will have this on the iPhone? A: That’s above my pay grade to be able to answer that.
Q: That’s a pretty high pay grade. A: Look, I would love for that answer to be yes. Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community. We have a billion folks using our services now, and we want to get to 3 or 5 billion one day. We’re going to do that by building the best experience across all devices. Android is growing quickly, and we’re excited that the platform is open and that it allows us to build these great experiences. I think that this is really good for Google too. Something like this could encourage a lot of people to get Android phones, because I think people really care 01/August 2015
about Facebook. In a lot of ways, this is one of the best Facebook experiences that you can get. Of course, a lot of people also love iPhones—I love mine, and I would like to be able to deliver Facebook Home there as well.
Q: Facebook now calls itself a “mobile first, mobile best” company. If you had started the company in 2013, would you have done it as a mobile app? A: I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a year I’ll just take a few days off and wander around and ask myself, if I were starting from scratch today, and I weren’t running Facebook, what would I build? I look at this mobile trend in light of the law of sharing, our equivalent of Moore’s law, which states that the average amount of information that a person shares doubles every year or so. Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.
Q: OK, so what is the next big trend? A: The big stuff that we’re seeing now is sharing with smaller groups.
Q: How would you implement that? Do you do it within Facebook or with separate apps? A: There’s a place for both. There’s a place for a service that only communicates with your core friends and family, and I think that’s going to be ubiquitous. But there are other great services out there doing great things. Instagram is a good example of this. They just crossed 100 million active users. It’s a much smaller product by Facebook standards, but it’s a really meaningful product.
Q: A lousy 100 million. A: It’s big, but it’s not a billion. I hope one day it will be. One of our big challenges over the next few years will be figuring out our relationships with companies that clearly have the same kind of social sharing mission. Because Instagram is part of our team, we can really work through that stuff. That experience will help improve all the things that we do with Pinterest and Foursquare and Twitter. There are some really hard problems we need to solve. If we can, it’ll make the web of all these services so much more valuable.
Q: So you don’t want a walled garden? We’ve had a platform strategy for six years. Obviously, there aren’t many good
platforms that don’t build really good firstparty apps. We’re very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That’s the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way. But we choose not to be very paranoid and instead try to look for the ways that we can work with them.
Q: Let’s talk about News Feed. People have complained that they’re missing important stories from friends and instead are seeing sponsored content. How do you find the right balance? A: Everything that we have seen shows that ranking content is good for people. If you only have time to look at 10 or 20 stories, it’s much better to have the best ones at the top. I think that’s a better experience than missing your cousin’s announcement that she’s pregnant, because it appears 30 stories down. We run experiments all the time where 1 percent of users get an unranked feed and all the metrics that we have show that those people’s experience is meaningfully worse.
Q: Some of those stories may be ads, which you call “sponsored stories.” These find their way into the organic News Feed. A: The ad ranking doesn’t influence the organic ranking at all. Basically, for every 10 or 15 pieces of content, we insert one that’s paid. There’s no interaction between those two things. And we try to make the ads as good as possible too. Also, whenever we do some correction to show users more of what they want to see, the result is less “page” stories from businesses and brands. That makes the sponsors unhappy, even if it actually is the best thing for the billion people who are using Facebook.
Q: You’ll please the users over the advertisers? A: That’s the only thing that matters.
Q: There’s been a lot more effort to boost the business side at Facebook in recent months. Did going public force you to push the gas pedal on that? A: Two things happened at the same time, and I think it’s easy to conflate them. One is that we went public. But more important, a lot of usage transitioned from desktop to
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mobile. That’s what’s driven a lot of our decisions. We’d built a really nice business that scaled to billions of dollars on the desktop with ads only on the side of the page. But it was really a cop-out, because we weren’t tackling the hard problem of figuring out how to actually make the ads good enough to integrate with the user experience. With phones, there’s no room for a right-hand column of ads. That forced us to think about what the business looks like on mobile. But I want to push back on the idea that there’s been some wholesale shift within the company towardmonetization. We’re making an even bigger investment in consumer products than we are on monetization.
Q: Earlier you mentioned a Moore’s law of increased sharing. But some reports indicate that sharing might be leveling off. A: Sharing is not just about status updates doubling every year. It’s made up of all these different trends. In the beginning, people shared by filling out basic information in their profiles. Then we made it so that people could update their status. Then came photos. Now people are sharing through apps like Spotify. We talk about the Moore’s law of sharing, but we never meant that all this will happen on Facebook—it will happen in the world. Our challenge is to make that happen on Facebook. I draw an analogy to Intel. Moore’s law was great for them, because they could point at the world and say, “OK, in 18 months, someone’s going to fit this many transistors on a circuit board—we’d better be the ones to do it or else someone is gonna eat our lunch!” I look at this the same way. Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to 10 times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.
Q: But sharing can be exhausting. You hear about people taking “Facebook vacations.” A: It’s an interesting phenomenon. We have two ways to turn off Facebook: deactivate and delete. The group who chooses to turn Facebook off permanently is relatively small, but there’s a larger set of people who will deactivate their ac count for a day or two because they want to focus and study for a test—it’s the equivalent of locking yourself in the library. It’s actually a very popular feature.
Q: Did you ever take a Facebook vacation?
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A: I don’t think I ever have. I certainly turn off my phone from time to time.
Q: Changes made to Facebook used to reliably draw outrage, especially over privacy concerns. But when you announced Graph Search, which allows users to find more personal information shared by their friends, there wasn’t much of an outcry. What have you learned? A: One of the things we did a lot better this time is we talked to a lot of folks to understand the concerns of organizations and others. Typically we have an iterative approach, but here we felt, in terms of privacy, everything had to be there at the beginning. The project was actually ready to go in December, but we took an extra month to build more privacy tools.
Q: You say Facebook follows “the Hacker Way.” How is it core to what happens here?
Yeah, every week. It’s on how to build a business. Every Tuesday we go over a skill, and each group has a side project. When the class ends, they’ll come to Facebook and sell the products they’ve made, like they’re marketing them.
Q: Speaking of people you support, you recently held a fund-raiser for New Jersey governor Chris Christie. You got a lot of crap for that. A: No more crap than usual. We build a service that a billion people use. It’s an important part of a lot of people’s lives. We take that really seriously, and it’s a lot of weight. The people who want to work here are the ones who relish the impact and enjoy having the responsibility of holding up that weight—the positive and the negative. Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.~
A: It really is our philosophy for how we build stuff. There are a bunch of companies that try to make every release perfect, and Apple is the best at that. That’s wonderful, but there’s another way of doing things that’s potentially even better over the long term—allow yourself room to experiment and don’t try to make each individual release as polished as possible.
Q: You’re not yet 30 and you’ve begun to make some significant charitable contributions. What’s your thinking on this? A: Bill Gates offered me some advice: Don’t just give your money away—it’s something that requires practice to get good at. So why wait? Clearly I have a day job that takes up 99 percent of my time, so I can’t be running a foundation. But I can take a venture capital approach, where you invest in people. I made the investment in Newark schools because I really believed in the governor and mayor over there, and they’ve delivered.
Q: Why education? A: It’s not a coincidence—my wife, Priscilla, was a teacher when she graduated from Harvard. And I teach a middle school class over in East Menlo Park.
Q: You’re teaching a class? 01/August 2015
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helping along humanity 10 Unique Opportunities to Volunteer Abroad
By Zahara Heckscher Zahara Heckscher is a contributing editor and columnist on volunteerig abroad at Transitions Abroad. Her articles have been published in Community Jobs magazine and in the book Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy. Heckscher offers workshops about international volunteering and careers at campuses around the country and teaches online workshops for MelibeeU, an innovative professional development virtual space for international educators and students.
assist the Kenya Wildlife Service: Kenya Whether you want to monitor cheetah behavior in the Masai Mara, fight illegal bush meat trading in Tsavo National Park, or build a community-run elephant sanctuary on the Kenyan coast, Tembeza Kenya (TK)—a travel company with offices in Kenya, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States— can set you up with a monthlong volunteer gig. Unlike many operators who book trips all over the globe, Tembeza Kenya arranges volunteer projects in Kenya. Period. By specializing in one destination, they’ve been able to develop extensive collaborations with not only the Kenya Wildlife Service, Africa’s oldest conservancy, but with Kenya’s Ministry of Education and other government organizations.
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track leopards: South Africa In another Earthwatch Institute project, Conserving South Africa’s Mammals, scientists and volunteers work together to track endangered populations in the spectacularly beautiful Soutpansberg Mountains, an area of “breathtaking mountain vistas, pristine wilderness, and a remarkable diversity of plants and animals.” The project involves collecting data, analyzing GPS tracking information and studying the behavior of leopards, baboons, monkeys and other mammals under threat.
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preserve Loggerhead turtle nesting areas: Greece research the Great White Shark: Gansbaai, South Africa
Global Vision International, an organization dedicated to supporting international charities through volunteer programs, internships and raising funds, sponsors numerous opportunities for travelers to help stop the decimation of endangered animals. The Turtle Conservation Volunteer Program, located in the turtle nesting area of Lakonikos Bay in the Mediterranean Sea, asks volunteers to record the nesting activity of loggerhead turtles, protect the turtles’ nests and provide information on the importance of maintaining the turtle population to both locals and visiting tourists. The project is located near the charming fishing town of Gythio, in the southern Peloponnese.
Between 150 and 200 million sharks are destroyed each year, targeted by fisherman for their jaws, teeth, and fins, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars. In 2004, the great white shark was added to the list of endangered species. Because they grow slowly, mature late, and have low fecundity, they’ve been unable to keep up with humans’ exploitation. In South Africa, the first country to protect the great white, researchers working in what’s known as Shark Alley use volunteers in their ongoing efforts to better understand and correct the misperceptions of the littlestudied beasts.
monitor humpback whales: Australia Pender Bay, on the Western coast of Australia, is an important resting, breeding, stagging and calving ground for migrating humpback whales. Volunteers monitor, count and record whale populations and behaviors from the cliffs overlooking the bay, assist with raw data entry, site maintenance and kitchen and gardening duties. The Pender Bay Whale Research project, supported by Conservation Volunteers of Australia was founded by aboriginal leaders and continues to provide invaluable and updated information to researchers.
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excavate stone tools: Cortez, Colorado
restore a Buddhist monastery: Mustang Valley, Nepal Mark Hintzke’s started the Cultural Restoration Tourism Project (CRTP), a small nonprofit that uses volunteers to restore cultural heritage sites around the world, when he decided to use the world’s largest industry (tourism) to fund his restoration work by asking volunteers to pay for the chance to work alongside local architects and artists who are bringing precious cultural sites back to life. On CRTP’s current project, a 300-year-old monastery in Nepal’s apple-growing Mustang Valley, Hintzke’s volunteers are working alongside Lama Sashi Doj, a world-renowned painter and Buddhist monk who is not only supervising the renovation of Chairro Gompa (Chiarro Buddhist monastery), but is offering training in monastic art. Doj comes from a long line (five generations) of artists who specialize in monastic sculpture and wall paintings.
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Get out your trowel and whisk broom. On the campus of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, a 170-acre paradise outside Cortez, Colorado, students live in Navajo hogans, spend all their time outdoors, and consider themselves dressed up if they happen to be wearing a pair of clean jeans. That’s because the students at this unique facility set in a canyon between the 13,000-foot peaks of the La Plata Mountains are learning about archaeology not by reading about it, but by getting down into the dirt and actually digging. This unique school dedicated to exploring the ancestral Puebloan culture of the Mesa Verde region has always had the same mission: Get people interested in an ancient culture by letting them see it for themselves, letting them experience the thrill you can only get from, for example, uncovering a 1,400-year-old pot.
blaze a new trail: New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana Most volunteer vacations charge participants for the chance to do grunt work without pay. Not the Continental Divide Trail Alliance (CDTA), which runs two-to seven-day trips for absolutely nothing. So what’s the catch? CDTA is a bit behind schedule in building this trail (it was originally slated to be complete by 2008, the trail’s 30th anniversary) and needs all the help it can get.
01/August 2015
bottle-feed orphaned lion cubs: Victoria Falls, Zambia save stray dogs: Bali Despite being only 2,000 square miles in size, the Indonesian island of Bali has a population of over 600,000 unwanted, and often abused, stray dogs. Ac cording the Change.org, the dogs are often rabid and such a problem that Indonesian governmental authorities have resorted to brutal methods such as strychnine poisoning and shooting to cull the dog population. Bali Animal Welfare Association (BAWA), a nonprofit animal welfare organization, promotes volunteer vacations to help manage the problem in a more humane way through a program of sterilization and vac cines. The group’s goal is to “relieve the suffering, control the population, and improve the health of Bali‘s street dogs through medical care, spay/neutering, street-feeding, puppy adoption, and education of school children.” BAWA Volunteers are asked to help by walking dogs, assisting in the veterinary clinic, cleaning, feeding the dogs and socializing puppies and kittens. 01/August 2015
In 1972, when Living Free—the sequel to the influential, Oscarwinning 1966 movie Born Free— was released, more than 200,000 lions roamed the African continent. Between feline tuberculosis, poaching, and diminishing habitat, that number today has dwindled to fewer than 15,000. If something isn’t done soon, this icon of Africa could well be extinct. That’s why Amanzi Travel, a British-based travel company, offers volunteers the chance to work with, and hopefully save the “king of beasts.”
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the
life
list
Presenting 50 dream trips, daring quests, essential skills, & exalted states of body & mind
01
overachieve
Outside’s chief inspiration officer, 36-year-old ERIC GREITENS, is a master of getting things done. Like becoming a Navy SEAL commander with four tours, earning a Rhodes scholarship and a Ph.D., running 12 marathons and three ultramarathons, and now juggling operations for his own philanthropic organization with public speaking engagements, media interviews, writing books, and consulting— while still finding time to run, climb, and practice taekwondo. Here’s how he does it: “It’s all about energy. Whether you’re leading a nonprofit organization, running a private company, doing something outdoors, or conducting military operations—you have to build habits that keep your energy high. This is my formula: (1) Vigorous exercise: Six days a week, I walk out of a gym, a dojo, or off a track pouring with sweat. When I have a great workout, I rarely have a bad day. (2) Good fuel: When I eat clean, quality food during the day, my energy never sags. (3) Good partners: Working with a team of positive people keeps your spirits up. (4) Balance: I pray every day, and I also laugh, a lot. You won’t have focus without balance. (5) A goal: A worthy challenge will take care of your motivation for you.”
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by Stephanie Pearson
Take Two Weeks Off. Completely off. No phone. No computer. No watch.
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Swim Naked Somewhere you shouldn’t. On a whim. With friends.
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Get a passport Only 28 percent of Americans have one. Next: Fill it
Master a Second Language
A second language can get you a job, make you sexier (“Mon petit chou”), and even stave off dementia in old age. Then there’s that part about talking to people on your adventures. The best available crash course is Rosetta Stone software ($229; rosettastone.com), which will teach you at least enough to ask your waiter not to bring fizzy water. A full immersion program is much better, of course. Don’t have time to leave the country? Concordia Language Villages (concordialanguagevillages.org) offers four-day or one-week programs in ten languages at their campus on Turtle River Lake, in northern Minnesota. If you do have the time, and you want Spanish, the Institute for Spanish Language Studies offers a compelling combo program in Costa Rica: Spanish in the morning, surf lessons in the afternoon. ($1,200; isls.com)
Learn a Constellation
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Sagitta and Delphinus are visible almost everywhere in North America summer through fall (skyandtelescope.com).
01/August 2015
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become a bush pilot
It’s easier to pull off than it should be. Says Dan Rice, who flew for Alaska’s Homer Air Service for a summer: “You just have to be persistent and a little lucky. I didn’t know anyone or take an ac celerated course. I had my commercial license and owned my own plane for a while, but the real key was getting my flight-instructor certificate. That’s how I got so many hours so quickly—because you’re flying on someone else’s tab. Sending your résumé won’t cut it. Some guys go up and pump gas until there’s an opening. I flew up there and literally went door to door to all the operators. Then they take you seriously. You need at least 1,000 hours of flight time, and most guys are looking for Alaskan hours as well, because flying up there is so much more challenging than just about anywhere else. But I finally found a guy who took a chance on me.
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See a Tornado
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Coin a Phrase
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Lasso a Steer
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Silver Lining Tours (silverliningtours.com) and Tempest Tours (tempesttours.com), both based in Texas, offer multi-day storm-chasing expeditions during May and early June: peak funnel-cloud season on the Great Plains.
It’ll stick if it serves a purpose. That’s why “Talk to the hand” is still with us. Keep it concise, crisp, and encompassing. Don’t slack on the delivery. Examples: (1) You’re a mountain biker or skier and your issues are gravity and safety. You might lift a professorial finger and lecture, “Stay low, go slow.” (2) You’re tall and thin but want people to know you’re tough. Slap LANKY BUT MACHO on a T-shirt—and wear it snug.
Roping’s the easy part; it’s what comes next that’s hard. Before the surprise of a suc cessful toss wears off, the rope needs to make three complete loops around your pommel. It’s a quick wrapping motion, like beating pancake batter. If the bovine takes off before you’re done, you’re in for third-degree rope burns at a minimum and lost digits if you’re really unlucky.
Learn a Magic Trick
For a time-tested campfire sleight of hand, you need to study with the master. For decades, Michael Ammar has been the go-to source for workaday magicians. His vintage 1980s how-to tapes, available on DVD, offer concise instruction, even if Ammar looks more ac countant than magic man. The Exciting World of Magic features a classic card trick about an hour in called “Out of This World.” At the very least, you’ll be able to convince your kids you’ve got the power. (ammarmagic.com)
01/August 2015
Never Stop
“The weightlessness you get with skiing is really intoxicating,” says Klaus Obermeyer, the 90-year-old Bavarian founder of Obermeyer ski apparel. He became hooked on skiing in his alpine village at the age of three, using boards made out of orange crates. Since moving to Aspen in 1947, Obermeyer has missed only a handful of days on snow. “The days you miss don’t come back,” he says. Until recently, he liked to rip down black diamonds skiing the same speed as his age—yes, at 85, he was clocked going 85 miles per hour. But these days, Obermeyer sneaks out of his office to carve graceful turns: “They’re fast and sweet and smooth and wonderful,” he says, which is a lot like his view on life: “Love whatever you do, because love gives you positive energy. And embrace the wonderful gift of your body. I’m 90 and still building muscles.”
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Give Something Up
For a month. And preferably something you think you can’t live without. Like dessert. TV. Coffee. Driving. Diet Coke. Meat. That wasn’t so hard, now, was it? Next month, give up something else.
Get in the Best Shape of Your Life Choose a plan and stick to it.’
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ski powder master a surprising cocktail
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…on some ridiculously fat skis. Read more about skiing from top gear picks to the best places to ski to fitness and workout advice for skiers and snowboarders.
Unless you’re entertaining freshmen, nobody’s going to be dazzled by even the most ac complished mojito. And margaritas? Zzzz. So serve your guests a tasty foreign concoction undefiled by Americanization—like Peru’s pisco sour, which we learned of from a friend who grew up surfing the frigid waves of his native Lima: In a shaker, combine 2 oz pisco brandy (we prefer the excellent Pisco 100; pisco100.com), 1 oz fresh lime juice, 1 oz simple syrup, 1 egg white (trust us), and a handful of ice; shake (vigorously!) for ten seconds; strain into a rocks glass; and garnish with a dash of Angostura bitters. Salud.
Make a Man Cave
Win Your Age Group in a Race
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I dreamt of a basement or an attic or a plot in the backyard. I told her I didn’t need windows or heating or A/C. (Electricity, and a small fridge for beer, would be nice, though, I added.) Sweetie, I said, it’ll be the one place where I can stash muddy gear. Leave tools about. Spill things. Tinker. It will be good for both of us, don’t you think? What I got was a cave … for my stuff: a corner of the garage and a large metal locker (which, after much discussion, I was allowed to cover with stickers). It’s a start.
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Watch the World Cup
Live. In Brazil. You have four years to plan.
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Start small. A short mountain-bike race on your after-work loop, with only a few hardcore guys in your “division,” is much more winnable than, say, the Leadville Trail 100. If you can’t find something local at your level, look farther afield. Runners, check out runningintheusa.com. which lists some 13,000 races. If you’re dead-set on winning a sanctioned marathon, head over to active.com, which, among other things, lists less popular exotic events, such as the Northwest Passage Marathon, on Nunavut’s Somerset Island. This year’s event had 13 runners—total.
Get Bent
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When the North Shore’s Waimea Bay breaks, usually only a few times each winter, surfers head to its outer reef, where waves can reach more than 20 feet. Which leaves the crushing beach break free for a handful of fearless boogie boarders. “They take off hoping to get barreled,” says Carlsbad, California-based photographer Robert Beck, “and that maybe someone takes a photo of them. Then they just wait for the rinse cycle to end. Where that guy is going to land is no more than three feet deep. I don’t know if you’d really call it ‘riding the wave,’ but you have to give him credit for something.” THE TOOLS: Nikon D3, 400mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 200, f/4, 1/2,000 second. 01/August 2015
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self-guide the Grand Canyon
It’s like winning the lottery—literally. While anyone can drop $5,000 to sign up for a commercial raft trip down these 277 miles of the legendary Colorado River, running your own requires a Park Service permit awarded in an annual lottery ($25 to enter, $100 per person for up to 16 people if you draw; nps.gov/grca). Odds are it’ll take five years for your number to come up, which means you have time to prepare. You’ll want to develop good oar-boat technique (consider a class with OARS; oars. com) and run some practice expeditions on big Class III rivers like Utah’s Cataract Canyon and Idaho’s Hells Canyon. When it’s your turn on the Grand, make sure you have at least one ringer in your group, such as a former professional guide, and use a provisioner like Professional River Outfitters (proriver.com) to supply boats and pack them full of food. Then it’s 25 days of utter glory.
take a risk
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But understand the terrain. Like these visitors at the Grand Canyon’s 100-foot Havasu Falls, who were hucking from ledges 30 feet up when Bennett Barthelemy photographed them. “All it takes is one person to go higher or flip and then everyone gets psyched and goes,” says the Ojai, California–based lensman. The Havasupai Indian Reservation, which controls ac cess to the land, stipulates that climbing on the rocks is illegal. “They don’t monitor the jumping,” says Barthelemy, “so you have to be smart about it.” THE TOOLS: Nikon D700, 70–300mm f/4.5 lens, ISO 640, f/5.6, 1/1,250 second.
Beat the Train
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The premise of the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic (ironhorsebicycleclassic.com) is gloriously simple. The 50-mile road race begins in Durango, Colorado, and—6,700 feet of climbing and two mountain passes later—ends in Silverton. The historic narrow-gauge train takes an average of three and a half hours to make the journey. All you have to do is beat it. If you’re in pretty good shape, like my father-in-law and I were, it’s a demanding but doable challenge. Both man and train leave downtown Durango at the same time, chugging along side by side as you head toward the hills. Your routes soon diverge, but the train keeps rolling in your head. You know the time you have to beat, the speed you have to average. So you downshift, get out of the saddle. A few minutes later, you look at your computer, recalculate, and stand up again. If you’re like us, three hours into the race, with your thighs about to explode, you absorb the frantic energy in the air toward the top of the last climb. The math says you’ve still got a shot at beating the train. You bomb the last descent into Silverton faster than you normally would and blast down Greene Street with just minutes to spare. Who knew it could feel so good to beat a slow, stinky old train? 01/August 2015
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Become an Expert Hatchet Thrower You can throw any old ax, but a doublebladed beauty like Gränsfors Bruks’s Throwing Axe ($242; gransfors.us) is the way to go, ac cording to Joel McCarty, executive director of the Timber Framers Guild, which oc casionally holds axthrowing competitions. Next: “Get a big, heavy target, usually the butt of a log three feet or more in diameter—six inches thick at the minimum—on a stand or easel rugged enough to take repeated blows. Plywood targets last a couple of minutes at most. Stand approximately 20 feet from the target. Square up with a two-handed, overhead grip, starting with the handle almost vertical, ax head down. Throw that baby toward the target with your shoulders. Do not snap the wrists too much. The ideal trajectory is a gentle arc. The ax will rotate a time or two and take quite a bit of leverage to dislodge from the target—assuming you hit it.”
Step on Antarctica
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Until Virgin Galactic starts offering bargain fares on its space flights, the continent fondly referred to as “the Ice” is the closest we’ll get to visiting another planet. More tour operators are voyaging south, but go with a responsible outfitter like Intrepid Travel. On its new ten-day Antarctic Peninsula trip, you’ll make a twoday crossing from Argentina on the 100-passenger, icebreaker-class M/V Polar Star, spend three days on the continent, walking with penguins and watching whales from Zodiacs, and then catch the South Shetland Islands on the return (from $5,260; five trips from November to March; intrepidtravel.com). Wanna sweat a little? Try summiting Antarctica’s highest peak, 16,067-foot Vinson Massif, with RMI mountain guide Dave Hahn. He’s been up Everest 12 times, Vinson 27 (rmiguides.com).
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Talk to a Wild Panda
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Only an estimated 2,500 giant pandas still live in the wild, most of them spread around China’s 50 or so panda reserves. Seeing one is best done with an outfitter. Terra Incognita leads groups into the heart of panda habitat and has a new nine-day trip to Foping Nature Reserve, in the Qinling Mountains, which has one of the highest densities of the animals anywhere. ($6,000; ecotours.com)
Travel the World on a Teacher’s Salary
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The world is reachable now, even on a budget. In the past year, on teachers’ salaries, my wife and I have been to Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, France, and England; the year before that, Egypt, Corsica, Italy, and New Zealand. We backpacked and cycled, but we also applied for residency in New Zealand so we could work there and stay longer. In Egypt, we were volunteers in a film re-creating an ancient voyage in the Red Sea. I taught for a summer in Florence. But our real find was a small sailboat in the Mediterranean. Every summer, for about $6,000, we buy a boat and sail for weeks along the coastline from France to Turkey, enjoying the islands, coves, and medieval walled ports. We’re seeing the best for almost nothing, because in the end we sell the boat for about the same amount. We see places the landlubbers don’t—and we’re spared the crowded umbrellas and banana hammocks.
sail across an ocean
Make it the Pacific. From May to September, it’s downwind all the way from California to Hawaii. It’ll get warmer every day, phosphorescent plankton will light up the rolling seas at night, and the hula music keeps getting louder on the radio. Before you cash in the house to buy your own boat, go with some pros. Joining a crew isn’t easy—it’s every sailor’s dream trip—but J World Sailing School offers up to six spots a year for either the Transpac (L.A.–Hawaii) or the Pacific Cup (San Francisco–Hawaii) on a Santa Cruz 50, a boat designed for offshore racing. You won’t sleep much over the eight to ten days, but isn’t that the point? (Approximately $10,000; sailing-jworld.com)
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01/August 2015
Trek in the Himalayas
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The options are as overwhelming as the peaks. Allow us to simplify. (1) The Classic: Everest Base Camp. Ac cording to RMI guide Melissa Arnot, the first Western woman to summit Everest three times, “you won’t find overcrowded trails (unless the yak trains are considered crowding). The Khumbu Valley contains some of the most unique culture of anywhere I’ve ever been. The trek, which can take up to three weeks, is moderately challenging. Fall is optimal for cool, crisp weather, but if you want to witness the summit stampede, go in spring, when most Everest expeditions start.” Arnot guides the Base Camp trek for RMI ($4,500; rmiguides. com) and offers customized trips through her company, Infinity Expeditions (from $3,000; infinityexpeditions.com). (2) The New Trip: It’s not complete, but the Great Himalaya Trail will stretch a total of 2,800 miles through China, Bhutan, Nepal, India, and Pakistan. The Nepal section alone covers more than 1,000 miles at altitudes from 7,800 to nearly 20,000 feet. The first company to guide commercial treks on the trail will be World Expeditions (starting in February 2011, from $3,600; worldexpeditions.com).
Go on a Walking Safari
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Because anyone can watch a lion feast on a wildebeest carcass from the backseat of an open Land Rover. But witness these magnificent beasts on foot--allowed in just a few spots in Africa, including Botswana’s Okavango Delta--and you’ll fully appreciate the heart-thumping, primal threat our ancestors once lived with. Arrange a trip with Africa specialists Uncharted Outposts (unchartedoutposts.com), and be sure to request guide Ralph Bousfield in Botswana.
learn to kayak
Read Right
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Here’s an exercise to try before your next journey: Pretend as though you’re leaving one week earlier than you are. Get packed, scour guidebooks, pore over maps. Then unplug the computer and read a book about your destination cover to cover—without checking a single online review or blog. Because your eyes need a break from screens. Because it will inspire you. And, mostly, because the right book will bring you far closer to the place than Google Earth. A few starters: Mexico: The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck; the Alps: Solo Faces, James Salter; Patagonia: In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin; Alaska: Coming into the Country, John McPhee; the Caribbean: Swimming in the Volcano, Bob Shacochis.
Start a Group Ride
01/August 2015
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Paddling down a lonely stretch of whitewater grants you ac cess to the places that most people don’t think exist anymore—wild, untrammeled, off-limits. Start your education slowly. “The biggest mistake,” says Peter Sturges, owner of California’s Otter Bar Lodge Kayak School, “is letting your buddy convince you that you’re good enough to go on the river the first day.” Learn to roll in flatwater first. Then learn how to execute turns by carving your edge. Hook up with an experienced paddler when you do decide to tackle moving water, both for safety and smart pointers. Or go with Sturges himself. His weeklong courses on the Salmon River ($2,190; otterbar.com) have introduced thousands of newbie paddlers to the sport—all without the prospect of downing a PBR from a wet booty.
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Pick a good time (mornings are always better) and a sweet route. Invite friends and co-workers. Soon you’ll be buying custom jerseys (mtborahcustom.com).
wing it
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Sebastian Junger has made a career out of winging it. In 1993, while trying to find someone to publish his eventual bestseller The Perfect Storm, he flew to Bosnia, where, with no experience and no credentials, he figured he’d make a go as a war reporter. Seven years later, having spent time in battle zones across the globe, he was in need of a refuge—a place where he could unwind back home. So he and fellow writer Scott Anderson decided to open their own bar, the Half King, on Manhattan’s West Side. For his latest book, War, Junger embedded with a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan for a total of five months, including several stints alongside photographer and cameraman Tim Hetherington. The two decided to shoot and self-finance a documentary film—a first for both of them. The result, Restrepo, which airs this November on the National Geographic Channel, won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at Sundance, in January. All of which is to say that Junger, now 48, is writing his own story. In The Path of Most Resistance, Outside’s ERIC HANSEN gathered some of the high points.
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Volunteer After a Disaster
But do your homework. Parachuting into a disaster zone like Haiti or New Orleans, with no specific skills or mission, will have less impact than texting $10 to the Red Cross. First, get some medical training beyond first aid and CPR (training.fema.gov). Then visit the World Volunteer Web (www.worldvolunteerweb. org), a UN-sponsored clearinghouse listing opportunities for boots-on-the-ground involvement. And then: Wait. Most regions hit hard by tragedy get plenty of aid in the first few months (Haiti right now) but desperately need help a few years removed from the tragedy (Sumatra or China’s Sichuan province, for example).
Build a School in a Foreign Country
First, volunteer with an NGO or nonprofit in the country you want to help (guidestar.org is a good source). While there, plan to meet with local leaders to see what’s really needed. “If locals are not brought in, often that’s when you see schools left unattended, teachers that aren’t getting paid, and projects that kind of disintegrate,” says Shannon Galpin, president and COO of Mountain2Mountain (mountain2mountain. org), a Colorado-based nonprofit that builds schools in Afghanistan. Finding teachers is one of the biggest challenges. Try recruiting recent graduates from a local university. The last piece: fundraising. See item 40 for tips on this. Or, if you’d rather join an in-progress project, choose the region you’re passionate about and scour the Internet.
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Raise $2,500 for a Cause
1) Sign up to participate in a race or noncompetitive athletic event (active.com). Any event requiring some degree of training and sacrifice will do. (2) Choose a cause that means something to you (networkforgood.org), Then do some research and select a specific project to fund. (3) Create an online donation site that provides details of your event and the specific project you’re supporting (active.com/activegiving). (4) Send an e-mail solicitation and a link through Facebook and Twitter. Be sure said e-mail describes how much you’ll be suffering for their money and specifies the project they’ll be funding. (5) Watch the donations fly in. (If not, keep repeating step 4 and dial up the guilt with each suc cessive plea: “So sorry to bother you again. I’m only sending this note to people who have for some reason NOT donated to my cause. Perhaps you didn’t receive my first note?”) (6) Train for the event (outsideonline.com/ fitnesscenter). (7) Complete the event. (8) Follow up and thank everyone who donated. (9) Bask in the warm glow.
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01/August 2015
ride l’Alpe d’Huez
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It’s the most famous climb in the world, the site of the Tour de France’s first-ever mountaintop ending, and a stage finish almost every year since 1976. It’s 8.7 miles long, with 21 hairpins, each named after a stage winner; an absolutely punishing average grade of 7.9 percent; and a total elevation gain of 3,641 feet. Translation: It will crush you. But it doesn’t necessarily have to cost you that much. Cycling Classics’ self-guided five-day Oisans Valley Cycling tour, which also has a few other famous climbs (Galibier and Les Deux Alpes) on the itinerary, is just $785 (cyclingclassics.com).
Catch a Steelhead on a Spey Rod
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Spey casting, a two-handed Old World technique devised to catch ill-tempered salmon, is not just for the aesthetics. Steelhead are basically bulldozers with scales; they demand heavy equipment. Fishing with a spey rod is like batting with a telephone pole. British Columbia’s Dean River is your best bet for hooking into a world-class fish—a narrow canyon with fast water and numerous falls only two miles from the river’s mouth has weeded the gene pool of everything but the strongest. The guides at Deneki Outdoors, which runs a fishing-specific lodge on the Dean’s delta (from $4,500 per week; deneki.com), will put you on plenty of bruiser fish. Landing one is your job. Spey casting, a two-handed Old World technique devised to catch ill-tempered salmon, is not just for the aesthetics. Steelhead are basically bulldozers with scales; they demand heavy equipment. Fishing with a spey rod is like batting with a telephone pole. British Columbia’s Dean River is your best bet for hooking into a world-class fish—a narrow canyon with fast water and numerous falls only two miles from the river’s mouth has weeded the gene pool of everything but the strongest. The guides at Deneki Outdoors, which runs a fishing-specific lodge on the Dean’s delta (from $4,500 per week; deneki.com), will put you on plenty of bruiser fish. Landing one is your job. 01/August 2015
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Build a Cabin in the Mountains
If you haven’t yet zeroed in on a specific region, start by checking out United Country Real Estate (unitedcountry.com) or Rural Property (ruralproperty.net), which will give you a general lay of the land and direct you to local realtors. Now grab a Delorme Atlas and Gazetteer map and start driving and stopping and walking and driving... And don’t forget about wintertime ac cess or water sources. Then the cabin. Building one yourself requires at least six months, a garageful of tools, and serious skills. Hesitating? Increase your chances of suc cess by taking a course at the Great Lakes School of Log Building (schooloflogbuilding.com). Or there’s Shelter Kit (from $30 per square foot; shelter-kit.com), which sells spartan, sturdy, precut cabins that can be assembled in as little as a week by two people with no special skills or equipment.
Follow Up
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I saw it written up in a magazine when I was 16 and noted it in my journal: a farmhouse at the end of a lonely road in Provence with a tiny, Michelin-praised dining room. I wrote down the name, La Bastide de Moustiers (from $246; bastide-moustiers.com), and vowed that someday I’d take a beautiful woman there. Eighteen years later, I finally did. It was worth the wait— and the ridiculous tab. Our suite’s bed was like a cloud; the hours-long fixed menu, cooked with herbs and vegetables from the garden and pigeon shot that day, kicked off with flutes of 1998 Krug Rosé, was a revelation. The next morning, my wife and I played pétanque out back with the chefs, then ambled around the medieval town and up into the breezy hills. The place was so seductive that I ditched plans to monkey up limestone walls at a famous sport-climbing hot spot nearby. Instead, I just sat in the sun rubbing my belly, picturing myself old and content and vacationing like this often.
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go to New Zealand
Join the Circus
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To acquire a tour bus, as a band, is to arrive. Ours was 36 feet long, 16 years old, and bright yellow, a 1987 Bluebird International school bus our bluegrass band bought for one dollar as part of our first professional contract, which came from a circus. And not just any circus. This was Circus Smirkus, a European-style, one-ring outfit run by former hippies in northern Vermont. There were six of us, college kids aged 20 to 21, and our job was to write and play bluegrass for 82 Wild West–themed shows, in 30 towns, over eight New England summer weeks, entertaining crowds of 800 screaming children and beaming parents. Our burden was our wardrobe: fauxrhinestone-covered wool shirts that hung heavy with sweat. Our reward: the bus. We gutted her and installed couches and a subwoofer, painted flames in the vicinity of the wheel wells, mounted a set of cow horns on the grille, and named her Bessie. The Astroturf we planned for the roof never came to fruition. On the dashboard, we kept a tally of the things we hit: six birds; five street signs; innumerable hedges; a mailbox in Newport, Rhode Island; and a town hall in Cape Cod. All summer, we dreamed of the magic words the circus director uttered whenever the tent came down: “Be in York, Maine, in three days.
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Learn an Instrument Your voice counts.
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Live Abroad for a Year
From longtime contributor Mark Jenkins, who moved his family to Salobreña, Spain, for a year: “It doesn’t really matter where you go, to be honest. Just get out! Find out if your employer will let you work from abroad. Or many companies will give you leave without pay. Once you know where you’re going, you need to do recon. Fly over and spend two weeks doing homework. Find the place you want to live and sign papers to rent it. You can do a house swap, but then you have far more limited options for where you’re going. I know a lot of people who hate renting their home, but you don’t really want to leave your house empty for a year. Think carefully about how to do your banking. You also have to figure out how you’re going to get around. Are you going to have a car? Then you need an international driver’s license and insurance. Always go light. You’re encumbered by your possessions so often. Buy a pocket dictionary. People will be helpful if you smile and try.
This is what the earth looked like before we got here: strands of waterfalls, snowy peaks, surf-stringed coastline, and deep fjords. Kiwi-owned Active New Zealand will show you the country as the locals see it: in motion. Biking, sea kayaking, hiking, and drinking sauvignon blanc are just a handful of the options on the 14-day Rimu trip ($3,800 per person; activenewzealand.com). Prefer to go on your own? Launch from Christchurch and head north around the South Island, stopping at Hapuku Lodge and Tree Houses (from $468; hapukulodge.com)—just wait until you see the view from the shower. Next, ride rainforest singletrack and farmland overlooking Golden Bay on Abel Tasman Mountain Biking’s multisport trips (from $144; abeltasmanmountainbiking. co.nz). Down south, raft the Shotover with Queenstown Rafting (from $134; queenstownrafting.co.nz). Ask for the Maori guide (and old salt) “Chief.” He’ll make sure you don’t disappear when the Class V Mother-in-Law rapid completely submerges you.
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Ski-Bum for a winter
To find out how, we went to the source, 20-year-veteran ski bum George Kuckly, of Telluride, Colorado, who said: “The big misperception is that working as a liftie is the ultimate ski-bum job. It’s not. That just guarantees that you’ll be working on every single powder day. What you want is a night job. I worked as a dishwasher for my first eight years. Bartending, waiting tables—that’s another unrealistic situation. Those jobs are locked down by the locals. I drove the transportation bus at night. And don’t think you’re going to find a nice room for $300 a month. Try $1,000. I live in a three-bedroom, the last ski-bum house in town. It’s basically nice winter camping. If you’re fortunate, you can skibum in a lot of luxury. But at the end of the day, whether you have six zeroes at the end of your bank ac count or two, we’re all on the mountain to get after the same thing. In Telluride, that makes us one big happy family.
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Get Tubed
Corey Senese, of CoreysWave Professional Surf Instruction (coreyswave.com), explains how: “There are barreling waves in California, Long Island, Mexico. Long Beach is a great surf break known for tubing waves, and it’s only about 45 minutes from New York City. Places like Log Cabins and Pipeline, on the North Shore of Oahu, are famous for tubing but are also challenging, crowded, and potentially dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Look for the right surf conditions—three to ten feet plus— and light offshore winds. Once you have the wave lined up, paddle hard! If you’re about to pull into a tubing wave, the drop is fast and steep. Take a high line into the steep section ahead of you. Wait a second while the lip of the wave comes over your head and you get swallowed by it. Take a deep, life-changing breath of tube air, because less than 1 percent of people ever experience this feeling.” 01/August 2015
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Climb the Grand Teton
This iconic, 13,770-foot fang of granite is tough and technical, but still a reasonable goal.
You’ll breathe hard. You’ll be scared. It’ll take two days. That’s the appeal: This iconic, 13,770-foot fang of granite is tough and technical--but still a reasonable goal, even if you’re a rock rookie. Especially if you join a trip with Exum Mountain Guides, the most elite mountain-guiding service in North America. They’ll make you prove you’re up to it with two days of classes--or, if you’re relatively experienced, a one-day “check-out” climb. The ascent itself begins with a seven-mile approach to Exum’s gear-stocked hut, on the lower saddle of the Grand Teton. Your team will rise before dawn the next morning to begin a series of roped-up pitches that are moderately difficult (from 5.4 to 5.7) and stunningly exposed. Chances are you’ll tag the summit before noon and savor some 360-degree views over Wyoming and Idaho, then it’s down, down, down to Exum HQ and the best beer of your life. (From $775; examguides.com).
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Chase Down Your Hero
I’m not a Buddhist. But of anyone on earth, the person I’d most wanted to see was the Dalai Lama. He’d been at the top of my list for more than a decade. A few of my other heroes died before I got a chance: Edmund Hillary, Evel Knievel, James Brown. But they’re not the Lama. This past May, I decided to stop waiting. I checked his schedule, redeemed some frequent-flier miles, and took an inconvenient late-night flight to Indianapolis to hear the 75-year-old spiritual leader speak for an hour to a crowd of more than 9,000 people in a pin-drop-quiet basketball arena. I watched most of the talk on the JumboTron. Then I flew home. Sure, I could have just watched the Internet feed, but it wouldn’t have been the same. There was something else at work in that arena, something personal that doesn’t translate in any medium. I can’t begin to say what. You just had to be there.
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trek Torres del Paine
Approximately 130,000 turistas descend annually upon Torres del Paine, the Chilean national park centered on three 7,000-plusfoot granite spires. But most don’t stray from the 47-mile circuit known as the W Route, which offers spectacular vistas of the Paine massif—and lookout points clogged with map and camera toters. The forgotten valleys—Valle del Silencio, Valle Bader, and Valle del Pingo—are three granite-wall-and-hanging-glacier-enclosed, wildflower-studded, boot-friendly areas. Trek them in shoulder season (September– October and March–April) and the only people you’ll see will be diehard climbers on the Paine spires. Antares Patagonia Adventure, a local outfitter that guides for American companies like Mountain Madness, offers a nine-day trip that includes seven hours of strenuous daily trekking; two nights in climbers’ camps; and a few nights of recovery at rustic refugios and classic lodges. (from $1,785; www.antarespatagonia.com). 01/August 2015
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