Have Charlie Rose and Fareed Zakaria Found Utopia in the Dominican Republic?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 12.21.05 | 11:27 PM ET
Sometimes I stumble across travel tidbits in the oddest places. This morning, via Jim Romenesko, it was a New York Observer profile of Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, whose writing I always enjoy, even if I don’t always agree with his politics. Zakaria, the story reports, was invited last year to take part in an odd vacation development project in the Dominican Republic that also involved musician Moby and talk show host Charlie Rose, among others.
Reports the Observer:
The Dominican Republic had suffered an economic collapse, and the I.M.F. forced the country’s central bank to sell a 2,000-acre tract of lush beachfront property that it owned. A group of about 20 American luminaries formed a consortium to purchase the land, with the idea of building a sort of utopian community, where artists and writers would be invited to stay at cost and the moguls and moneymen who’d financed the place could vacation, play golf and bask in the glow of their artsy neighbors. The list of “founding residents” includes Moby, Charlie Rose, Alex von Furstenberg, the hedge-fund manager Michael Novogratz, fashion designer Lela Rose and, to lend the group a little political weight, Mr. Zakaria.
I never figured out what became of the project, and I couldn’t find anything else about it online. Interesting idea, though.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
