The Real Me: Notes on dating in the Google era

Wrote a story for The Morning News about online courtship and the persistence of personal histories on the internet (for better or for worse). Here's how it begins:

Certain questions answer themselves. Like when a message appears in your email inbox from a romantic interest who you’ve barely met, whose full name you don’t yet know, and to whom, come to think of it, you’ve never given your email address—a message with a subject line reading, “Is this stalking?”

Read the rest at The Morning News.

And, holy crap, the story got some link love from The Dish, one of my own must-read blogs. That made my day.

For readers who got here via The Morning News or The Dish or are otherwise new here: Hello. Thanks very much for stopping by. Also sort of amusing: judging from the web stats, plenty of you have also taken the time to figure out Maren's last name (never mentioned in the story) and google her and find HER website. Which is kinda awesome, kinda creepy, in keeping with the essay's themes.

Anyway. Please take a few minutes to look around and read some other stuff, will you? There's ...

• This blog, which I'm not very good about updating, although I hope still you'll subscribe or at least check now and then for stories from here and there. Right now, I'm partway through an extended series of posts from an Enrichment Voyage 
• A book I wrote last year, Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day (Perigee Books/Penguin), which recounts my attempt to tour Europe using only a 1963 guidebook. Part offbeat travel memoir, part social history of the beaten path. A National Geographic Traveler Book of the Month. Available at IndieBound, Amazon, B&N, or my favorite indie stores.
• Or just keep it short and sweet and read one of my own personal favorites of the things I've written, an essay for World Hum called "Seven Travel Rules From a Brooding Teenager."

Cheers.