Tom Bentley

For more than 100 years, the coastal wetlands of central California have been drained and graded to allow for farming. In one area near the town of Moss Landing, what was once slough is now 450 hectares of artichokes, strawberries, Brussels sprouts, and lettuce—a bounty of growth. And fueling it all? Nitrate-laden fertilizer, the runoff of which pollutes waterways, wetlands, and the nearby ocean. Farmers clearly appreciate the yields that fertilizers facilitate, but many acknowledge that thes...

The dog’s name was Bentley. I should have known there would be trouble, because my name is Bentley too. And though I don’t poop on the carpet, I have some anxiety issues as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s anchor: for years, my girlfriend Alice and I have house-sat all over the world, for a month or two at a time.
Panama, Hawaii, Ecuador, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Mexico, lovely places all, where the setup is that you stay rent-free in exchange for taking care of the house, t...

Planning an afternoon sail with the kids can be hectic. Note the weather, choose the clothes, what to eat, how long to stay out. Planning a 6,000-mile sail with the kids that includes moorings in seven countries might take, oh, a decade or so. That’s how long East Bay parents Bruce and April Winship prepared before finally setting sail with their young daughters on their 33-foot catamaran, Chewbacca, for a 10-year sailing voyage that included treks with Kuna Indians, hikes at Mayan ruins and ...

You can’t keep a good locomotive down—especially when it has the momentum of history behind it. A legendary train that wouldn't die.

A legendary steam train comes back to life after 50 years of slumber.

A pen that writes upside down, underwater, in extreme heat and cold? And that’s not the best of it: it writes in outer space too! A fun piece on the Fisher Space Pen, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018.

San Francisco’s Beat hangouts are still thriving, long after Kerouac and Cassady took their last road trip.

Legalization will bring joy, light and peace in the valley, right? Not quite. This piece looks at pot legalization in Santa Cruz County, CA from the perspective of the licensers, the cops, the dispensaries and the growers, both legal and not.

Another script I wrote for Chris Guillebeau’s Side Hustle podcast, where he discusses people who have started successful and often fascinating side jobs. This one profiles two pals who developed small, portable filtration systems for boating crews, outdoor recreational enthusiasts and others to provide water free of bacteria and other contaminants. Used with refillable containers, saves the environment from plastic water bottles too. Published in May 2019 on the Side Hustle School.

Your engineering team has made profound advances: the software that controls a communications chipset they’ve been working on for over a year will soon be ready for its debut. You’re the product marketing manager that can talk geek with the best of them, but you can’t say a thing to your content marketing team—because you don’t have one. You’ve got enough engineers to code a new parting of the Red Sea, but anyone to put winning sales words in place and use the latest marketing technology to w...

As Mark Twain said after his latest marketing promotion, “The reports of the death of the email campaign are greatly exaggerated.” As any marketing maven knows, email lives, with a vengeance, and remains one of the biggest hammers in any marketer’s toolbox.
But as you know all too well, bad email promotions are death warmed over: email done wrong does your promos and your products a lethal turn.
Consider this scenario: You’re the VP of marketing for an SMB company that sells luxury goods onli...

The words are magical. “Once upon a time…” and you are seven again. There might be castles, dragons, or spaceships. Your brain—that thing that fixates on the overdue electric bill, the anxiety-inducing headline, the murky future—vaults away from worry and embraces the story. Storytelling is one of the most ancient of human arts, but tellingly, a good story told today offers the same irresistible invitation as ever.
As Rachel Gillett said in this Fast Company piece, “When we read a story, not ...

Stories are food. You can make a reasonable argument that stories are a human nutritional requirement of the emotional-developmental type—food for your brain, you may call it. We share collective stories in our social structures and personal ones within our consciousness, and all influence our motivations, actions, and reflections. In the business world, brand storytelling is now close to a movement, rooted in customer empathy and connection.
Tom Gerace, Skyword’s founder and CEO, has been a ...