Apologies for the radio silence over the past month or so; I’ve been helping develop and launch two new sites devoted to business intelligence/data analytics and cloud computing, SlashBI and SlashCloud. You can find me talking about the project to VentureBeat and TheNextWeb.

And because I don’t quite have enough to do these days, I’ve also been blogging about the book over at The Huffington Post—you can find the first two entries here and here.

For those who want to save a few trees, however, Barnes & Noble is also offering the book as a Nook download.

I.

We need heroes. We need their stories, the better to soothe us with the illusion that our lives have weight and significance. That we can stand against the titanic forces that will crush us without warning.

The fishing village on Japan’s northeast coast existed until a few minutes past eight o’ clock on the night of June 15, 1896, when the people inside their wooden houses opened their eyes to darkness—and a rumbling noise that drowned out the sound of dogs barking, the crackle of fires settling to ash.

Four months later, an article in National Geographic described what happened next:

“Only a few survivors on all that length of coast saw the advancing wave, one of them telling that the water first receded some 600 yards from ghastly white sands and then the Wave stood like a black wall 80 feet in height, with phosphorescent lights gleaming along its crest.”

Those lucky enough to spy the tsunami ran for higher ground, or their roofs. Except for one nameless man:

“A half-demented soldier, retired since the late war and continually brooding on a possible attack by the enemy, became convinced that the first cannonading sound was from a hostile fleet, and, seizing his sword, ran down to the beach to meet the foe.”

The wave hit. It smashed houses to kindling, carried boats a mile inland, snapped off trees at the roots, tore away a temple’s stone crossbeams and hurled them the equivalent of three football fields. It killed more than 27,000 people, by some estimates, and left the survivors to struggle with the wreckage and bodies. One of the latter, presumably, was the “half-demented soldier.”

Japan sits on the circum-Pacific seismic belt, whose network of deep-sea trenches and volcanoes earns it an ominous nickname: the Ring of Fire. When the unstable crust trembles, it shifts millions of tons of water, which crushes everything in its path. Your only options are escape, or death.

II.

On March 11, 2011, another earthquake shook the country.

In video after video online, you see people step beneath doorways or crouch in their tracks as the ground shakes, as lights swing wildly, as boxes and books tumble from shelves. Minutes later, a tsunami barrels into coastline. Television cameras in helicopters record the wave as it makes landfall, dissolving the countryside in brown water foaming with wreckage. Far below, people focus their phone-cameras and digital recorders on the flooding streets.

In one clip, a white van drifts down a two-lane street on boiling whitecaps, followed closely by a small fishing vessel. Windows shatter before the force of water. The tide rises faster and faster, higher and higher, lifting parked cars by their trunks, dragging them into the new black tide.

The cameraperson climbs atop a flight of concrete stairs set into a hillside, swinging his lens to the right. A block away, a two-story building spews brown dust—and then it starts to move, buoyed by the flood, crunching against the structures hemming it in. Separated by time and distance, confined to a tiny window on a computer, the destruction takes on the surreal quality of a fairy tale: the scene, perhaps, where the evil wizard waves his wand and unleashes a dark force on the land.

That dark force left wrecked cars, cored-out homes, fishing boats stranded inland, power outages, radioactive water gushing from a plant smacked by the tsunami. Whole mountains of debris needed excavation and bulldozing and carting away. And the bodies needed finding, pulled from the cool mud back into the heat and light.

The world is a ball of unseen cracks, capable of disaster at any moment. Los Angeles can shake itself to pieces, although it often prefers to burn. Hurricanes whirl through the Caribbean, stripping islands clean in their path. On top of that come the man-made tragedies: broken drilling platforms that gush fish-killing crude, the jet-bombers flash-frying the surface of a distant desert.

Every time, the survivors bury their dead and figure out how to best regain normalcy—to create a new “home,” a comforting bubble in which life can happen. So you clear the rubble. You begin hammering fresh planks together. You set marked stones at the tsunami’s highest watermark, to discourage building beneath that point, knowing full well that people will eventually set roots again in the danger zone—because that’s what we do, letting ourselves believe that the next disaster will never really come.

In the meantime, you find heroes: the woman who pulled two or three others from the path of the disaster, for example, or the man who treated wounds until he collapsed from exhaustion. You point at them as if to say, this is how we survive. This is how we come back.

III.

I traveled to Japan in October of that year, on assignment to see how the electronics factories in the Tohoku region, north of Tokyo, were recovering from the disaster. As an editor at a technology-news Website I had received reports for months about lost chip-fabrication capacity, manufacturing units offline, times needed to return to full production: ruination reduced to the driest possible terms, numbers arranged neatly in black-and-white columns.

After landing I puzzled out the bus system and made my way to the hotel in Chiba, a suburb of Tokyo—where I learned the entities involved had decided, at some point during my flight over, to cancel the planned trip north. I still had a conference to attend and a talk to co-host alongside three other British and American journalists, but it looked like I would stay in Tokyo for the duration.

I kept a lookout for signs of the earthquake: cracks in the roadways or windows, an imploded building or two. Years before I’d traveled to Nicaragua, on assignment, and seen rubble that people claimed an earthquake had left forty years before. Friends of mine had returned from New Orleans, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, with cameras full of photos of the destruction: torn-away bridges, stores reduced by floodwater to a teetering front. Damage lingers.

But not in Tokyo, it seemed. Any cracks had been smoothed, the roadways repaired, the broken glass cleared away. If any of that work was still in progress, it was lost amidst the tarps and scaffolding of regular construction, the cycles of build-up and teardown that act as any big city’s respiration.

Instead, the damage manifested itself in other ways. The conference was a chance for Japanese companies to display their latest technology. In America, these sorts of events feature consumer gizmos, tablets and phones, and the emphasis is always on the newest and coolest.

This Japanese event, though, overwhelmingly featured the sorts of devices you stockpile in event of disaster: batteries, waterproof communications gear, technological innovations that would allow your electric vehicle to power your home. Everywhere you looked, Japanese companies had devoted themselves to creating ways to survive, and keep your life charged, even after the whole electrical grid collapsed.

The Japanese executives explained their reasoning behind these inventions, muttering a single phrase over and over again: “March 11.” The same way Americans intoned “9/11” in the decade after the Twin Towers collapsed in piles of rubble. Four syllables meant to convey infinite amounts of pain and loss.

Societies are people, and they work out their wounds like people: once the bandages come off, there is scar tissue, sensitive and red and barely healed. It takes time for those scars to blend with the skin. For you to forget how that wound happened in the first place.

IV.

While wandering through Tokyo I found myself thinking about that deranged soldier, the one who had charged into the face of the wave. I’d read his story years before, in a coffee-table book that collected some of National Geographic’s earliest articles. Now I had some context, however distant.

I thought about the term “half-demented soldier.” I assumed the “late war” referenced in the article was a reference to the First Sino-Japanese War, which ended in April 1895. Illustrations from that conflict suggest the brutality with which the Japanese and China’s Qing leaders fought for their respective goals. You can hypothesize that the soldier’s “dementia” was a case of post-traumatic stress disorder, whose symptoms include guilt, bursts of anger, and exaggerated responses to events.

Trauma or no, I imagine the sight of that enormous wave stopped him in his tracks. Horrified, he could have turned and tried a run for the hills, despite the tsunami’s lethal speed.

But that version feels uncharitable. Instead, picture him charging across those white sands, hand on the hilt of his blade, maybe screaming into the watery thunder, knowing the full import of his suicidal gesture, before the wave’s shadow blots him from existence. That would be the Kurosawa ending: a samurai-style refusal to yield, in even in the face of certain annihilation: a human icon of that desire to protect “home,” the most ephemeral thing, which too often disappears in an instant.

To me, that feels like heroism.

The official Website for How to Become an Intellectual is up and running, with a few choice excerpts and introductory blog postings. The book itself is still slated to arrive in mid-April.  

Also, a little company called Apple unveiled some sort of device this week.

Near the end of 2010, I began working on a not-so-short story eventually titled “What the Fire Cost Us.” It originally had a prologue, which appeared in Satellite Magazine’s inaugural issue as “All in a Day’s Work,” but that small section didn’t play well with the whole and ended up discarded (when in doubt, chuck your prologue or introduction and move right to the main narrative).

The story in its entirety is slated to appear this summer in Carrier Pigeon, an illustrated-fiction quarterly. I’ll be reading a few pages from it at Grit N Glory (186 Orchard St.) this Thursday (event starts at 7 pm). I promise you rural family drama set in the 1920s, spiked with liberal amounts of arson and murder.

Meanwhile, How to Become an Intellectual is drifting between rankings 12 and 18 (depending on the day) on Amazon’s list of Hot New Releases in Self-Help and Psychology. I’m not even wholly sure what that means, but I’ll take it.

Yes, it’s been some time since I’ve updated. I return from the metaphorical wars, tromping through the whole half-inch of snow left by this strangely warm winter, with a choice bauble: namely, my interview with Xerox CEO Ursula Burns on eWeek.

Other things are imminent. Meanwhile, the upcoming “How to Become an Intellectual” now has a Facebook page and a Google+ page, complete with excerpts and photos—because nothing’s real these days unless it’s on a social-media Website. The book itself is still on track for a mid-April release.

I first traveled to Vegas four years ago, to interview celebrity chef Bobby Flay for a now-defunct magazine. Most of that trip was spent in the bustling kitchen at his Mesa Grill in Caesar’s Palace, jotting down quotes and local color, wary of stepping in the wrong direction lest some irate sous-chef decide to slam a blade through my writing hand. I never saw Vegas proper, save for the few minutes it took to walk from cab to restaurant and back.

I’ve returned several times in the intervening years, though, and always for work. Everything about it creeped me out, on a fundamental level, and it took a few miles’ worth of walking casino floors and the Strip to puzzle out the root cause: for a city ostensibly built to entertain, nobody looks happy. Not the senior citizens milking a cigarette, a cup of vodka, and a penny-slot machine; not the people packing the games tables; not the people exiting the shows. They’re all grim as cogs in a neon machine.

What the advertisements would like you to believe is a citywide party (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”) instead feels like some massive social experiment designed by Jean-Paul Sartre in a crappy mood. Fortunately, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was busy enough to keep me in the Las Vegas Convention Center roughly 12 hours a day.

Anyway, New Year: a very short and positive review for my very short fiction story published in late 2011 in Satellite magazine…

…new eWeek pieces…

…a custom-publishing project I co-authored for Graycliff (a boutique hotel in the Bahamas) finally sees the light of day…

…and (gratuitous plug alert), my upcoming book has a finished cover—you can take a look over at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Not so long ago, I specialized in writing about luxury paraphernalia: the watches, private jets, high-end alcohol, and cars that act as signifiers of extreme wealth. The irony being that, while midlevel Wall Street executives and junior corporate vice presidents leveraged their credit to the maximum in order to purchase that newest and shiniest Piaget or Bugatti Veyron, many of the truly wealthy people I encountered—the multi-hundred-millionaires, the billionaires, the one percent’s one percent—seemed to prefer more understated accoutrements: the sport watch in place of the diamond-crusted timepiece, the decent but decidedly un-flashy suit.

But I digress. When it came to writing about high-end goods and services, the first and biggest trap was succumbing to the Curse of the Inflatable Adjective: the urge to staple a hyperbolic “fantastic” or “exemplary” in front of a particular brand name, and call it a day. That fails on two counts: first, because such terms fail to explain why that particular object deserves that description, and second, because… well, hyperbole belongs in press releases, not articles.

Which, of course, brings me to the subject of coffee.

This afternoon I went to a little café named Sweetleaf, in Queens. The establishment’s current claim to fame is the La Marzocco Strada espresso machine tucked behind the counter. If you subscribe to the hype, to compare the Strada to your typical restaurant espresso-maker is to equate the Bugatti Veyron, once the world’s fastest production vehicle (and certainly one of the most coveted), with a rusty VW bug.

In the name of crafting the supposedly ideal espresso, the Strada’s sleek steel body offers individual coffee boilers, a means to electronically control brewing temperature, a paddle that helps regulate something called “progressive pre-infusion,” and a bevy of other high-end features. If you believe the reports, the whole package costs around twenty thousand dollars.

Now, I’m not an expert in the sticker prices for various pieces of restaurant equipment, but twenty thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money for a relatively small piece of hardware whose primary function centers on quick and steady output of coffee, no matter how wonderful the actual result. But all such things deserve their day in court.

I sat in one of Sweetleaf’s brown leather chairs and gazed through the plate-glass window at traffic rumbling its merry way toward the bridge, and sipped my three-dollar espresso from its little blue cup.

Some ostensibly quality products, in reality, are little better than their cheaper equivalents; I let the liquid coat my tongue at a slower pace, rather than slugging the whole cupful back, in order to better judge whether the Strada produced something of better quality than your typical restaurant caffeine-shot.

It seemed there were two flavor notes at work: a tangy bite, afloat within something smooth and sleek. I tried describing it aloud. I suddenly sympathized for writers whose jobs involve describing subtleties wine or perfume. Tangy, but there’s another taste, too. Way to be articulate, there. In a certain way, though, taste is like pain; too soon, you run out of words that adequately describe it.

I bussed my cup in the bin by the counter. The barista looked up: “What did you think?”

“It’s like I was tasting two things. It wasn’t like your typical espresso shot, where you just sort of get that zing,” I said. “But that zing was sort of floating in this other taste, like an emulsion?”

In my defense, my espresso-fueled blood was already pounding through my heart at record speed, my words tumbling out slightly faster than thought. Yet the barista started nodding: “There is that bitterness. And that other thing.”

Fantastic, I almost said, and stopped. The hardest part always comes with trying to describe things as they really are. But sometimes the words run out.

Once upon a recent midnight dreary, as I plopped on the couch for a viewing of John Carpenter’s horror opus The Thing, there suddenly came a tapping—no, more like a furious knocking—at my apartment door. I opened it to find my next-door neighbor, in a state of profound agitation, asking if I knew anything about door locks.

I offered that, yes, I knew a little. For the first time I noted the wordless cries of anger emanating from somewhere in the building, sounding very much like a tribe of chimpanzees infuriated by a particularly annoying puzzle. My neighbor escorted me to the building’s front vestibule, where a few of my fellow residents had gathered around the front door. Someone had broken off a key in the lock. The fragment jammed in the mechanism was frustrating all attempts to pull it free with their fingers. Terror and chaos reigned.

“Hold on,” I said, and returned upstairs, where I fetched a pair of pliers from my toolkit. Thirty seconds later I had the offending bit of key freed from its prison, along with the eternal gratitude of my neighbors.

Sooner or later, tools (and the ability to use them) come in handy.

On a totally unrelated note, the one and only Lost magazine (which published some personal essays of mine over the past two years, including this one about the global economic collapse) will produce its last issue in the next few weeks. It will be missed.

On eWeek: A much more formal piece on the Japan trip, focusing on how the earthquake affected the country’s technology industry.

On Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble: For those who like to plan far ahead (and by “far,” I mean you’re the type who buys birthday presents for people ten months in advance), my new book, “How to Become an Intellectual,” is now available for pre-order. The release date is April 15.

The book itself is a tongue-in-cheek guide to the intellectual lifestyle, broken down into 100 chapters: topics of enlightenment include everything from reciting Romantic-era poetry on cue, to knowing how to play at least one classical instrument, to fighting “idea wars” honorably and well. Along the way, the discussion veers into decidedly esoteric territory: how beer is responsible for civilization, for example, and ways to recreate the infamous Vidal-Mailer brawl in your living room.