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Schools and periods
I wrote about periods, and how they relate to 23% of Indian girls dropping out of school permanently, for the New York Times. The link to the Great Wash Yatra is wrong: this is the right one. Below, on...
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TED2013
I can finally announce, with great delight, that I’ll be giving a fourteen minute talk about sanitation, shit and toilets at TED2013 in Long Beach, California, on February 28. The conference is called...
View ArticleA night to remember
My stepfather John died two years ago of dementia. The disease turned him from a witty, gentlemanly man into a snarling, violent, distressed and emaciated one. My mother, a strong, wonderful woman,...
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Action figure
I’m an Action figure on Circle of Blue this week, and they have designed me a wonderfully cool banner.
View ArticleAdmiral Nurses
My stepfather John Wainwright died slowly and horribly from Alzheimer’s. What we really needed, but did not have, was a consistent, calm and helpful navigator through the social care services. Someone...
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Ted2013
I’m going to write later and at length about what a mind-widening, wonderful experience TED2013 was. A week of doing nothing but meeting interesting people and hearing about interesting ideas and...
View ArticleTED
My TED talk from this February’s Long Beach conference is up. Let’s talk crap. Seriously.
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Credits
My TED talk lasted fourteen minutes but required months of preparation. So many people helped me along the way, so here are the credits and thank yous. First the slides. Leslie Mello was the design...
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How to help
I am often asked the best way to help improve the world’s shit crisis. The answer is: there is no best way but there are plenty of ways. My first advice would be of course to talk about it. Write to...
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Celebrating Womanhood: PERIODS
OK, that’s not the exact title of the report I’m going to write about, but I hope it got your attention. During my India trip on the Great Wash Yatra with WASHUnited, I spent a considerable amount of...
View ArticleThe human cost of piracy
Somali piracy has diminished, thanks to (in my view) many more ships carrying armed guards, but also due to ship crews following Best Management Practices (eg zig-zagging the ship if a suspicious skiff...
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Publication dates
My new book on shipping will be published soon. It has two different titles for the US and UK, but it’s the same book. Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside shipping, the invisible industry that puts...
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Two titles, one book
I’m writing this as people are confused about why I have two books coming out shortly. I don’t. I have written one book, but it has two titles. So here is why. Four years ago (!) when I started...
View ArticleFresh Air
I talked to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (that’s the US equivalent of Start the Week, for UK readers), about shipping, sound, and fatbergs. You can listen to it here. Americans may need this to...
View ArticleDaily Beast
I’ve written a piece on shipping and playing my count-the-shipped-things game for Daily Beast/Newsweek.
View ArticleRadio 4 Book of the Week
Deep Sea and Foreign Going will be Radio 4′s Book of the Week from September 9. Of course I’m delighted by this, it’s a great honour. Also I can’t wait to hear my words read – much better than I could,...
View ArticleOops
An error has crept into my book, and into the extract which is widely available, and which Longreads ran yesterday. The International Transport Workers Federation represents four million transport...
View ArticleMarketplace
I talked to Kai Ryssal of NPR’s Marketplace the other day. The interview is now online here.
View ArticleWhat I have been up to
I’m writing this from a beautiful garden in Kathmandu. I’ve just spent a week in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where beautiful gardens probably exist, but I didn’t see them amongst the noise, dirt and traffic so...
View ArticleAfghanistan thirteen years ago
I found an old hard drive, with old stories on it. Here is one from 2002, when Glamour Magazine sent me to Afghanistan to report on women’s “liberation.” I found it, five days after Afghanistan’s top...
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