Interview with Karl Taro Greenfeld
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 03.15.06 | 12:53 AM ET
The author of “China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic” fields questions from Rolf Potts. Among the highlights is his recollection of freelancing travel stories, along with another writer friend, to high-paying Asian in-flight in the early 1990s: “We systematically wrote our way through all the different quaint topics: tea ceremony, Japanese slippers, Thai kickboxing, Sumo wrestling, all the cliches—and tons of little travel stories, but we were bad: we would sometimes write travel articles about places we had never been—and then just crank the stuff out. It was like vocational training for magazine hacks.”