I live in Montclair, NJ, with my wife, Jalaire, and son, Henry. Two other sons, Jack and Aidan, are away studying.

We live in a split-level house. One realtor referred to it as a "starter." We have two cats, Rocksand and Thome. I can walk to the train or bus stop for access to New York City. (Bus takes about 25 minutes in the best of times.)

Until November of 2009, I was a senior writer covering technology for BusinessWeek. When the company went up for sale, in the summer of '09, I positioned myself for the exit. Now I'm freelancing and writing the next book.

We moved here from Paris (Rue Oswaldo Cruz, 16th ar.) in 2002. We lived there for four years. I used to run in the Bois de Boulogne. (It was a wonderful time to be earning dollars in France.)

Our apartment in Paris, featuring my right foot and Jalaire's back. I was just starting with the digital camera and was a little too eager with the solarized look. But in this shot I like what it does to Jalaire's blouse.


At the very end of my book leave, in June of 2007, I rode my bike from Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, near Pittsburgh, to Montclair, stopping en route at Gettysburg. (I'd like to get another book leave so that I can bike the Oregon Trail.)

I started at BusinessWeek as the Mexico City bureau chief. My whole schtick back then was Latin America. I'd worked in Venezuela and Ecuador, and at a paper, the Herald-Post, in El Paso.

I was working in Pittsburgh, covering steel, when I noticed that the magazine was giving me very little space for my stories. When I started writing about software and the robots at Carnegie Mellon U., they got more generous. That was when I moved into technology.