He attended De La Salle High School in Detroit and the University of Michigan.
He traveled widely from 1979 to 1986 for the Pacific News Service and several magazines, and from 1986 to 2002 as the at-large foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.
He covered the overthrow of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of terrorism in the Middle East and the civil war in the Balkans.
As of February 2023, his most recent National Geographic assignments were on Venice's efforts to combat rising sea levels[a] and the outsized role of the Netherlands in global agriculture.
[b] As a freelancer, he has also written a front-page story on Brexit in the New York Times International edition,[c] and an essay for the New York Review of Books on the Italian journalist Enrico Deaglio's book on the mass lynchings of Sicilian immigrants in 19th-century Louisiana.