December 2007 Archives

Happy New Year Everyone,

I'll be on the road over the holidays, and taking time to finish the draft of my new book, so in the meantime, here are a few end-of-the-year awards.

Correction of the Year. Is Dunkin' Donuts the key to interfaith harmony?

Faster Trend of the Year. The Feiler Faster Thesis is having a boom month. It's been used to explain the election. And Britney Spears!

Turnabout of the Year. Even the Right is now advocating what we've been endorsing all year on Feiler Faster: Talk to Iran.

And a few more items that caught my eye recently. The pastor of the Methodist Church across where I attended synagogue in Savannah wrote a thoughtful piece about wise men and Christmas that included some nice words about me.

For readers of WHERE GOD WAS BORN who have been wondering about what's going on inside the Baghdad Museum, which I toured in the months after the invasion, the NYT has a rare peek inside.

And the NYT has picked up on another theme of that book: Make-your-own-faith.

Finally, please come back in January when I report back on the winner of my annual Predictions Game with my brother and unveil my picks for this year.

Episcopal Life online has this story up today.

Best-selling author and commentator Bruce Feiler will bring his unique world view on today's global conflicts to Kanuga Conferences February 18-20 for its annual Bowen Conference.

Drawing on extensive research and adventures in more than 60 countries on five continents, his talks will center on the theme "Rooted in Faith: Discovering History's Bounty."

Feiler is the author of seven books, including Walking the Bible, Abraham and Where God Was Born. He is an award-winning journalist and the creator and host of the PBS miniseries "Walking the Bible." His most recent books combine history, religion, adventure and personal discovery and offer an interfaith message and a vision for peace and reconciliation.

During the two-day conference, Feiler will deliver three keynote addresses -- one of which will provide a sneak preview of his upcoming book on religion's central role in shaping America -- with question-and-answer time after each address.

The Jewish-born author has spent 20 years as a commentator on American life and a decade reporting from the frontlines of Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran and beyond. A graduate of Yale, Feiler holds a master's degree in international relations from Cambridge. A regular contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered," he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Washington Post, and is a contributing editor at Gourmet and Parade. A native of Savannah, Georgia, he lives in New York with his wife and twin daughters.

Affiliated with the Episcopal Church since 1928, Kanuga is a 1,400-acre camp and conference center in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Hendersonville, N.C. The Bowen Conference was created through the generosity of the late Buford Bowen as an annual conference to explore Christian commitment. Since the first was held in 1989, the Bowen Conference has grown into one of Kanuga's premier conferences.

I, for one, would like to ditch bulkly guidebooks with all those chapters on places I'm not going to, but the time is not now. I can see buying the overseas mapping service for my GPS and downloading a chapter to my Blackberry, but not yet. Still seems futurisitic. But change is coming. Lonely Planet has been sold to the BBC. It's now offering chapters of its guidebooks for sale online and will upload all of their content online soon. Restaurant recommendations and other tips are more current online than in books. But guidebooks seems to be defying the rush to online content, for now.

So far, the digital media revolution has been much less turbulent for guidebook publishers than for record companies, which have fallen victim to rampant online copying. Sales of travel guides, while flat in some traditionally stalwart markets, like Britain, have been growing strongly in developing countries and in the United States - despite a weak dollar, which has made overseas trips more expensive for U.S. citizens. Travel publishers sold 14.8 million books in the United States last year, up 11 percent from two years earlier, according to Nielsen Bookscan.

Still, guidebook companies may have missed an opportunity on the Internet, which presents them with moneymaking possibilities that have not generally been open to publishers of other kinds of books.

"Given how conducive the Internet is to what they do, they were probably a bit slow in developing this side of the business," said Alexander Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online, which tracks Internet traffic.

TripAdvisor spotted the potential in tapping users' reviews of hotels, package trips and tourist attractions, and collecting a fee each time they click through to reserve a room, for instance, on a partner site. TripAdvisor supplements users' reviews with links to sites run by guidebook publishers like Frommer's. TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, does not break out financial figures separately from its parent.

In reaching Internet audiences, TripAdvisor has clearly been a big success, placing third among travel-related Web sites worldwide, according to Nielsen Online. About 3.6 percent of users of travel Web sites visit TripAdvisor in an average month, placing it third behind Expedia and another booking service, Orbitz. Among guidebook sites, Lonely Planet ranks first, Nielsen says, but with an audience reach of only 0.3 percent.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.

How do you get to the Oval Office? Wikipedia.

When Vífill Atlason, a 16-year-old high school student from Iceland, decided to call the White House, he could not imagine the kind of publicity it would bring.

Introducing himself as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the actual president of Iceland, Atlason found President George W. Bush's allegedly secret telephone number and phoned, requesting a private meeting with him.

"I just wanted to talk to him, have a chat, invite him to Iceland and see what he'd say," Vífill told ABC News.

A White House official, who asked not to be identified, denied the young man had accessed a private number but instead dialled 202-456-1414, the main switchboard for the West Wing.

Vífill's mother, Harpa Hreinsdottir, a teacher at the local high school, said her son did, in fact, get through to a private phone.

"This was not a switchboard number of any kind," she told ABC News, "it was a secret number at the highest security level."

Vífill claims he was passed on to several people, each of them quizzing him on President Grímsson's date of birth, where he grew up, who his parents were and the date he entered office.

"It was like passing through checkpoints," he said. "But I had Wikipedia and a few other sites open, so it was not so difficult really."

I'm pleased to report that many PBS stations will be begin to air all three hours of WALKING THE BIBLE with BRUCE FEILER this week. Check local listings. There's little uniformity on PBS stations, but I know that the show will air in New York and Seattle on Thursday nights at 8; in Boston on Friday nights at 10; in San Francisco this Thursday from 8 - 11; in Washington Christmas Eve from 9 to midnight. Many stations will air only on their HD channels.

Here is a compendium of previews that someone uploaded onto YouTube. If it's not being broadcast in your community, you can purchase the DVD at PBS or Amazon.com.

All the bloviating about the so-called "War on Christmas" just might provoke a war after all. New York mag decides to join the fray, on the anti-Christian side.Amid a welter of publicity for its supposedly anti-Christian message, The Golden Compass...

Is Chabad the future of Judaism? Some Reform and Conservatives must think so, they're criticizing it pretty heavily these days. First some background.WHAT'S Chabad's secret? They offer ease of entry. People taking baby steps into Jewish life are intimidated by...

The speech was well written and might pass muster in an undergraduate class on religion and the founding fathers, though even there he made some glaring missteps.“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the founders – in ceremony and word....

We celebrated Hanukkah for the first time last night with our two-year-olds. Sure, the last two years we lit the candles and gave them some presents. And a few weeks ago my family assembled for Thanksgiving and followed our (brilliant!)...