News from the Shawnee National Forest
It has taken a few more years, after the expiration of the order, for the logging to start up again, but the Forest Service has again marked 70 acres of trees to be cut in the steep hills of the Shawnee Forest.
Dispatches
How Budget Hotels Deliver Us into Liminal States
There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone else before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that very same room.
Does “Earthing” Work?
You know how disconnected we have become when it takes a craze to remind us to go barefoot and feel the earth.
Getting It Wrong Again
It was an astonishing moment for me, who never felt settled in what he knew.
Donald Trump’s Road to Damascus
A spiritual pilgrimage we never expected.
Duluth, Minnesota, and the Liberation of Lo-fi Travel
When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.
Grumpy Old…Men?
Curmudgeons, you see, have standards. Sherlock Holmes could not abide being fooled, and Statler and Waldorf suffered no foolish puppets.
Why Humans Shun the Humanities
History grows us up. And literature? It complicates the world for us. This is why we must kill the humanities.
Everything Addresses Us
“Tech is taking all the things you already disliked—triviality, noise, rudeness, interruption—and delivering them in a format you don’t have any control over.”
Secrets Are Buried in Our National Parks
The U.S. invented the national park—and ours hold mysteries of nature, of human eccentricity, of the past, of science and the supernatural....