WIRED, October 2006

The merely superrich buy land. The ultrarich make their own, using special ships called trailing suction hopper dredgers. These leviathans can hoover up to 835,000 cubic feet of sand per hour from the ocean floor and spit it out in a new location with the precision of an engineer. The vessels were originally designed to dredge waterways and repair storm-damaged coastlines. But the Rotterdam, owned by Dutch dredging firm Van Oord, is “rainbowing” sand into the Persian Gulf off the coast of Dubai to help build The World, an artificial archipelago of privately owned islands that will eventually resemble a map of Earth. Next up: Van Oord will terraform Palm Deira, another island destination for Dubai’s elite. “Instead of buying half of Manhattan or London, they’ve decided to invest in their own country,” says Bert Groothuizen, Van Oord’s marketing and PR manager. When it’s finished, Palm Deira will cover 57 square miles – requiring a cool 35 billion cubic feet of sand. The cost: $3.2 billion. But check out the location!

WIRED, August 2006

Heroes of Color
Every so often, comic books attempt to up their hipness quotient with ethnicity. The 1960s and ’70s brought the first African-American superheroes – the Falcon, Black Panther, Black Lightning, and Luke Cage (think Shaft, only more invulnerable). Forty years on, the diversity fairy has struck again. The Atom is now Chinese; the Blue Beetle, Latino. And there’s even more action in foreign comic books aimed at the US market…..

WIRED, August 2005

Hollywood to E.A.: Bring It On
Electronic Arts may be the biggest name in the sports world. But the movie biz is a whole new ballgame.

WIRED, May 2005

The WIRED 40.

They’re masters of technology and innovation. They’re global thinkers driven by strategic vision. They’re nimbler than Martha Stewart’s PR team. They’re The Wired 40….

WIRED, January 2005

The BlackBerry Brain Trust.

First he reinvented the way we get email. Now he’s rounded up a bunch of radical thinkers to reinvent physics itself….