This video is my first time seeing a sweep boat in action, and my first reaction was “DAMN that thing looks unwieldy,” so it’s really cool to watch someone expertly navigating it on Idaho’s Salmon River. (video)

I don’t know if I’ve previously mentioned the Rotating Sandwiches website in this newsletter before, but I have to believe that if you’re reading this newsletter, you know a) someone who would appreciate the Rotating Sandwiches website OR b) someone who would be somewhat confused but also entertained if you just sent them a link to the Rotating Sandwiches website with no context.

I’ve been enjoying literary agent Alia Hanna Habib’s Substack for a while now, but especially this post, Productive Terror: Ten Very Different Writers on How They Got Their Books Done, and especially this bit, from author Annie Hartnett: “I use a sticker chart and give myself a sticker for every 500 words written. It helps to have a visual representation of how much progress you’re making. We are big on sticker charts in the Accountability Workshops, and we’ll do sticker swaps in the mail. I also eat a lot of M&Ms while I write … I read a study in college that candy helps you concentrate and I haven’t questioned it since. Basically the tools I use to finish a book are the exact same ones you use to potty-train a toddler.”

We had one hot day in Missoula last weekend, sort of a warning shot/appetizer for summer. I am thankful that having a baby (and now a toddler) has precipitated a change in my running routine and made me a morning runner most days, but I’m still reminding myself that summer is about 100 days of warm temps. Two things I learned from this article about heat training from newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration: a) your brain can basically rewire itself to make you feel more comfortable in the heat and b) heat adaptation can actually increase your psychological tolerance to heat.  I am using Precision’s PH 1000 packets in my water bottles on most of my runs since I tend to sweat a lot no matter what the temperature is, and if you’re looking for an electrolyte drink for running or biking or hiking without a ton of calories/carbs, I recommend them (either of these links will give you 15% off your first PFH order).

Did I read through this entire list of The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century? I did not. I did make it through an embarrassingly high number of them, though, and I appreciate that The Ringer included the prompt “How would you explain this moment to someone who’s never watched sports?” for the writers explaining many, if not all of the moments.

This is a not that big of a deal but it is a very satisfying video of a new bike tunnel under Zurich.

Hilary and I have barely watched any shows since Jay was born (I’m not complaining), but we have made time for The Bear. Maybe because we both worked in restaurants for years, or maybe because it’s a good show? Anyway, Season 4 is coming soon (June 25) and the trailer dropped a couple weeks ago. (video)

If for some reason you want to read a deep dive on the technology behind and the history of air sickness bags (aka emesis bags), like I apparently did on Thursday, here you go. (Largest barf bag collection in the world, 6,290 bags, belongs to Niek Vermeulen of the Netherlands, but that number is from 2012)

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VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
We’re doing a limited-run water bottle starting today. It has my “What Does Your Urine Say About You?” Chart printed on the side. Is it a reminder to stay hydrated? (yes!) Is it a pee bottle? (up to you!) Is it a conversation piece? (yes!) Can you get one after June 20th, 2025? No. Pre-orders start today, and will close next Friday, June 30th, so if you want one, or know someone who would love one as a gift, here’s where you can order one (or several). Orders will start shipping the first week of August.

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I happened to catch this wonderful short film about the women dory boat guides of the Grand Canyon when I was at Mountainfilm a few weeks ago, and it was one of my favorites. Very excited it’s now on YouTube. (video)

I’ve been reading Michael Estrin’s substack for a while now, and I often find myself laughing at the situations and characters he encounters while doing normal things like going to Chipotle, or in the case of his most recent post, trying to check in for his appointment at the chiropractor. As my wife charitably says whenever we encounter puzzling behavior, “there are many ways of being in the world,” which is way better than my reaction, which is more of a bewildered look, throwing up my hands, and muttering some expletives.

The video for the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” came up in my YouTube feed last week, but I barely glanced at the thumbnail and didn’t click it. And then Hilary sent me the link to it a few days later, and I realized that it was a new video for a 47-year-old song. As one commenter put it: “They waited until Saoirse Ronan was born to make the video. Very professional” (video)

My neighbor poked his head over the fence a few days ago, when the high was in the low 90s here, and said he was surprised that something about me being outside in a long-sleeve shirt. I explained that yes, I am a huge fan of long sleeves in the summer since I spend so much time outside (running). They’re not for everyone, but if I have not used up my lifetime allotment of exposing my skin to the sun, I am damn close, so I prefer long sleeves to slathering on sunscreen (which, if I’m honest, I’m too lazy to do a lot of the time). So I own a lot of sun hoodies, which also protect my neck and ears. My most recent favorite is the Dunescape Mega print one I got from newsletter sponsor Janji—it’s stretchy, the arms are long enough for me to slip my thumbs into the thumb loops and cover my hands, and the pattern means I’m not going to trash it so visibly by wearing it for trail runs under my running vest. It’s available in a bunch of colors in a men’s version and in a women’s version (both M’s and W’s versions have the Dunescape Mega print if you’re into it)

She texted the wrong number asking for advice on what to wear on a first date with a guy, the wrong number guy responded and told her yes, green was as good choice, she wore green, the first date went well, they stayed in touch, and … well, I won’t ruin the ending for you.

I believe Japan does a few things (many things?) better than the United States, and creative manhole covers are one of those things. I was elated but not surprised to see that Major League Baseball collaborated with local artists to create custom manhole covers in honor of the 12 Japanese and Japanese-American players actively playing in the league right now. (thanks, Mitsu)

Look, I am not saying everyone should drink five or more cups of coffee per day, but I’m also not saying people shouldn’t. Anne Kadet, whose Substack is a treasure, interviewed a handful people who drink prodigious amounts of coffee, and it made me feel both happy, less weird, and less alone. And also validated in my choice to make a 9-cup moka pot yesterday afternoon.

Every once in a while—OK, probably every other week—there is a McSweeney’s post that captures my failure to function as a human being in a very specific way, and I read it and laugh, at the story, but more at myself. This most recent one, Welcome To My Well-Stocked Pantry Of Empty Boxes, really hit home just as I was pouring the crumbs of a box of crackers into my mouth while standing in my kitchen.

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I haven’t listened to a Moth story in a long time, but I somehow found out The Moth had a YouTube channel, and this was the first story I watched. This guy isn’t famous or anything, but I love this story, and his mom sounds like a real one. File under: Suprisingly Emotional Stories About Baseball. (video)

It’s a good question: Is it possible to buy a Bob Ross painting? I mean, it should be easy, shouldn’t it? But no, in fact it is not easy, and it is possible, and there’s a reason it’s difficult. But my favorite line from this whole article is from the gallery owner who finds Bob Ross paintings and buys them from the owners, who are mostly regular folks. He says, “Most families that have these paintings are not millionaires, and the money is very impactful in their lives.”

I don’t know if someone might say this is “political,” but I kind of assume that if you read this newsletter, you probably a) think public lands are a good idea and b) would be opposed to selling them. I won’t type out the details in my own words, but the sale of public lands is essentially back on the table, and you can call your senators and encourage them to not support it. If you have never done this before, 5Calls makes it super-easy (here’s a link to their page on this specific issue: Oppose the Sale of Public Lands in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act). If you are hesitant or nervous about calling and talking to a staffer or leaving a message, here’s basically what the conversation is like when I’ve done it:

STAFFER: Senator _______’s office, this is _____.
ME: Hi, I’m a constituent and I’d like to leave a comment. Do you need my address?
STAFFER: Yes.
ME: My address is [street address, city, state, ZIP code].
STAFFER: OK, thank you, what’s your comment?
ME: I’d like to encourage Senator _______ to [oppose H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation bill, and any provisions that authorize the sale of our public lands].
STAFFER: OK, anything else?
ME: That’s all, thank you.
STAFFER: Thank you.

I don’t know how I found the Why Cheap Art Manifesto this week, but something about the typeface and the style and the very simple message of it really hit home for me, and perhaps it will hit home for you too. If you are really into it, there’s a link at the bottom where you can purchase a print of it, which, at $20, I guess is technically cheap art, which is very meta, to support artists by buying a print of a manifesto about cheap art. But of course you can just read and enjoy it for free, too.

I made a pie chart graphic for newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration this past week titled “What’s In Your Water Bottle(s)?” and one of the pie chart slices was “stachybotrys chartarum (black mold).” Which reminded me of a trick I learned to keep black mold from growing in water bottles: Store them in the freezer. I’ve been using this method for years now, and I think it’s even more important considering the amount of PFH’s Carb & Electrolyte Drink Mix I am putting in them on a weekly basis. I get home from my run, rinse out my bottles with water, and chuck them in the freezer, and voila, no mold. (If you are interested in trying PFH drink mix, here’s a link that will give you 15% off your first order)

If you are a fan of Bruce Springsteen, or a fan of Jeremy Allen White, and/or a fan of music biopics, you might be excited about the trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which just dropped on Wednesday.

I was talking to Mike Sowden last week (on a video call, since he’s in Scotland and I am in Montana), and I have no idea what led to this, but he told me about being obsessed as a kid with the Terran Trade Authority Handbooks, and the way he described them lit up some sort of nostalgia center in my brain and took me back to the library in southwest Iowa where I’d flip through books with illustrations of spaceships, tanks, cars, bridges, whatever, and within a couple hours of getting off the call, Mike sent me this link to a scan of the Terran Trade Authority Handbook SPACECRAFT 2000 To 2100 AD book. Maybe you might enjoy it too. Maybe you, like me, will track down a used copy of the book on a website somewhere and spend $45 of your hard-earned money to own a paperback copy of it (or maybe you’re smarter/less emotional with money than I am?).

This is a very short, very simple essay about how human beings maybe don’t need to be just one thing, and I think it hit home for me because I see a lot of media about “your personal brand,” and I admittedly haven’t worked too hard on that kind of stuff, but if I had to design a business card about my personal brand, I think it might look a lot like the business card in the photo at the top of this essay, and I’m guessing yours would too.

When I put together this newsletter, I try hard to make sure it is not all links to 3,000-word essays on Substack, and does include some stuff you can digest in a minute or two, which I think is necessary in life, even if it doesn’t make us feel smarter. With that, I would like to present this 87-second video this guy made using various martial art techniques  to close a refrigerator.

Perhaps you read this newsletter last week and read that we’re putting my “What Does Your Urine Say About You?” chart on a limited-run Nalgene water bottle? You still have a few more days to order one as a helpful reminder to stay hydrated, for yourself or for someone you know and/or love. They’re available for pre-order through this link in my online DFTBA shop. I put together this fun short video using the sample bottle we made, and the full chart is below the video.

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IMPORTANT FINAL REMINDER:

If you or someone you know/love would enjoy this water bottle because you/they struggle to stay hydrated (or just enjoy the chart on the bottle), we’re in the final days of the pre-order campaign. After June 30, you will no longer be able to purchase these bottles (even during the holiday shopping season, when you remember that you need to get a gift for your friend Jeff, who probably would have loved one of these). Here’s the link (you can also click on the photo below).

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I love these kinds of sports-adjacent stories, not necessarily about the usual sports topics we think about, or necessarily about the players and/or coaches—but this guy, who got really, really good at getting on the Jumbotron at the Barclays Center, and how he cracked the code. (video)

I don’t know how this was done, but it’s super-cool—a guy mapped the geographic movements/migrations of more than 4,000 of his daughter’s ancestors, dating back to the 1600s, and put together this map animation. It’s such a cool visualization of how many lives and decisions were involved in one person being here now.

The folks at Injinji reached out a few weeks back, and asked if I was familiar with their socks. And of course I have been, since 2019, when I battled the most painful blisters of my life for the final 30+ miles of the Hellbender 100, and my friend Canyon said, “Yeah, you gotta get toe socks.” So I did, and I’ve been wearing them for long runs ever since, each of my toes happily in its own little compartment. Injinji is coming on as a sponsor of this newsletter, which is great because it’s a perfect fit, but also because if you’re reading this newsletter, this link will give you 20 percent off a purchase at Injinji.com if you order before midnight PST July 11. (I am a longtime fan of the Trail Midweight Crew, if you’re looking for a recommendation)

I am increasingly interested in the American loneliness epidemic, and maybe it’s not the most uplifting content, but The Pudding put together this short video breaking down the data of who Americans spend time with, and it hits pretty hard—I think in a way that inspires me to try to reach out and spend more time with friends in person. (video)

If you have ever seen Christoph Niemann’s art and design work, you will probably not be surprised at how interesting and accessible this interactive piece he put together about artists and AI for the New York Times is—the first time I read it, I scrolled through it on my phone, which honestly worked just as well as viewing it on my laptop. It really covers some ground. Here’s a gift link to see it. (thanks, Fitz)

I don’t surf, but I loved William Finnegan’s Pulitzer-winning surfing memoir, Barbarian Days, which I think will be a far different book than David Litt’s new memoir about learning to surf as an adult, It’s Only Drowning. I mean, when your book has blurbs by Laird Hamilton, Judd Apatow, and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, it probably comes from a unique perspective. This excerpt of the book on LitHub did not disappoint.   

I missed this when it came out—just before Father’s Day—but I now wish I had seen it and sent it to everyone I know who’s a dad and would laugh at it by the time they read the fifth sentence. So I guess belated happy Father’s Day to you if you click on this McSweeney’s link: Congrats, Dipshit, You’re A Dad Now.

This is not something I’d say has, uh, depth? But it had me laughing within a second of reading it in the replies of this post on Bluesky, and then I realized I couldn’t share it with anyone who wasn’t on Bluesky, so I tracked down this 2022 tumblr post, which I’m not sure is the original, but at least it’s visible, and maybe you’ll giggle at it while reading “Donkin Dunnts: Amurica Runn No Dundun” like I did. (Also, if anyone knows the origin story of this graphic, please let me know)

Finally: If you read last week’s newsletter and called your senators to encourage them to oppose the selling off of public lands, thank you. If you’ve been following the news, you might know that the Senate parliamentarian rejected the plan to sell 3.3 million acres of public lands, which is great news. BUT, a new proposal to sell off 1.2 million acres of public land is now on the table, so, basically, we all have to call again. Here’s the link to the public lands budget reconciliation page on 5Calls.org, which makes it very easy to call your congressional representatives.

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NOTE: I’m publishing this week’s post on Thursday since this Friday is July 4th, and lots of people/Americans do other things on July 4th. Please feel free to read it on Thusrday, Friday, or whatever day suits your needs.

This is a bit longer than the videos I usually include here, but I got sucked into this guy’s adventure on “America’s Worst Rated Train,” and honestly, it delivered. About halfway through, I wasn’t sure it was good press for Amtrak, but by the end of the video, I thought, you know, yeah, maybe it is good press for Amtrak. Kind of. (Although I do think it’s a little strange that he says “There is one train route that exists all the way from Miami to Alaska,” when the final, quite significant, leg of the trip is quite obviously on a boat?) (video)

I don’t know how I found this essay on youth sports (and also about parenting and coaching), but I kept stopping while reading and going, “huh, yeah,” and wondering if over the past couple decades, we have been (at least partly unintentionally) making sports less and less fun for the kids who participate in them?

When I mention newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration in these posts, it’s usually some sort of personal endorsement from me, a 46-year-old mid-pack ultrarunner dad, which I hope has some value (and authenticity). LIke hey, I’m a regular person training and running, and this stuff works for me, not just for super-athlete types who bound up mountains and barely break a sweat doing it. I was going to do that again this week, but then I saw the results for the Western States Endurance Run come in over the weekend, and realized that five of the top 10 men were sponsored by Precision Fuel & Hydration. (Including four of the top five, which included Missoula’s own Jeff Mogavero). So I guess take it from me, this stuff works for super-athletes too. Here’s a link to the PF 90 gels, a favorite product my both myself and Caleb Olson, who won Western States.

We are pretty lucky in Missoula to have a great local coffee roaster in Black Coffee, and maybe even luckier that Jim Chapman, one of the co-founders, is a creative guy who loves writing and photography. So when I get emails from Black Coffee (besides the ones that inform me my monthly coffee subscription just shipped), I usually open them. The most recent one—“My 5 Favorite Methods for Camp Coffee”—was an easy sell, too, because Jim knows a ton about coffee, and isn’t a snob when he discusses it (I appreciate that he includes instant coffee in his list, because in my opinion, there’s a place and time for it). Anyway, don’t take it from me, a mere coffee enthusiast—take it from someone who’s actually an expert on coffee, and camping.

I can’t even remember the first time I bought a pack of Field Notes pocket notebooks, but I vividly remember the 15 or so minutes I got to spend talking to Aaron Draplin at an event we did in Chicago in 2017. Being charismatic is one thing, and being down-to-earth and funny in tandem with being charismatic is a whole other thing. I have been rooting for Draplin for a very long time, and it’s really cool to see this article about the phenomenon that is Field Notes (as well as this link to a page showing part of Draplin’s vast collection of vintage pocket notebooks).

It’s crazy to think that it’s been 15 years (!) since The Social Network came out, and I can’t say I think the material for a sequel is exactly uplifting, I am cautiously optimistic that Aaron Sorkin will make another good movie (especially if he can convince Jesse Eisenberg to participate again?).

I’m not trying to put a link about AI in every issue of this newsletter, but I knew when John Oliver tackled the subject, it would at least be entertaining. And of course he went at it from an angle—only talking about AI slop, which, in the span of this 29-minute segment, had me laughing, a little sad, laughing, disappointed, laughing, a little angry, laughing, and then applauding at the end.

Because that’s how the PhotoshopRequests Subreddit works, you have to scroll through the replies here to see all the wacky edits people did to this photo of this guy tossing his baby in the air, but I think it’s pretty rewarding scrolling per centimeter of thumb travel.

Last weekend, I was in Wisconsin for my niece’s graduation party, and the morning of the party, I ran down the street from their house to a county park and ran three 1.05-mile loops around the road that circles the park before heading back to the house to pick up my nephew to run a couple more laps around the park with me. To my great surprise and mild entertainment, I got an email from Strava informing me that the first three laps had given me the “Local Legend” title for the most reps on that loop in a 90-day period. I have always found Strava’s Local Legend feature to be humorous, because I every time I’ve gotten a notification that I’ve become a Local Legend of something, it’s always some obscure short segment that I’ve never consciously tried to run a lot of reps of. And it’s usually called something like “Unnamed Rd Climb,” which for some reason is really popular in the Missoula area (and I guess a few other places). So, that’s a long story, but: We made a coffee mug. For me, I guess, and you, if you’ve ever been a Local Legend of Unnamed Rd Climb or something else obscure. OR, even better, if you’d like a gift for your spouse or friend or running partner who would get a good chuckle out of having a dubious honor displayed on a coffee mug. Here’s a photo, which you can click on for more information:

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I am a big fan of Luke Nelson, who is a dad, husband, physician’s assistant, sponsored trail runner, ski patroller, race director, and just a swell guy in general. I remember seeing his “Pocatello Round” come through my Strava feed in the summer of 2024, and thinking, “Well, of course he did that.” Luke dreamed up a 72-mile route around his hometown of Pocatello, Idaho, and ran it with friends, and this short film documents the effort and people that made it possible. (video)

(Also, here’s the Strava map and details of his run, if you’re interested in seeing what it looks like on a map)

The Hardrock Endurance Run starts about an hour after this newsletter publishes on July 11 (6 a.m. Mountain Time), and I wanted to share a couple relevant links—one is the interview Zoë Rom and I did with Katie Schide, the UTMB and Western States Endurance Run champion who is definitely favored to do well at Hardrock. We talked a little bit about her college job hauling giant pack loads up trails to the White Mountain huts in New Hampshire, how she has trained for Hardrock by spending time in Leadville, Ouray, and Silverton, and her PhD thesis. Here’s a link to listen on Apple Podcasts, and here’s a link to listen on Spotify.

Second: I loved this preview of Hardrock from longtime runner and writer Sarah Lavender Smith, who finally got into Hardrock this year in her mid-50s. It’s a great breakdown of how she’s prepared, what she’s expecting, and how she feels about running the race in her mid-50s as opposed to her mid-40s. If you’re following the race and want to root for someone, you can root for Sarah—and/or some of the other Hardrock women competitors in their 60s she lists in her Substack piece.

It’s sunny here in Western Montana right now, and f I am not wearing a sun hoody on my trail runs, I have been wearing the new Trekker Snappy Shirt from newsletter sponsor Janji. The high collar is great for covering the back of my neck on days when putting up a full hood is just too hot for me. The shirt is 10% off in the two remaining colors (I am a fan of the Reverse Paisley because I think it’s fun and also hopefully doesn’t show stains as much?). It’s listed as a “men’s” product but as you can see in the pics, it’s not necessarily just for men. And of course you could wear it for things other than running.

I wouldn’t say I’m much of a horror fan—I can’t say the last time I watched scary movie, and I’ve read very few horror books. But I am Patreon pen pals with Wendy Wagner, and got to chat with her at my Portland book event last May, so when I heard she had a new book coming out, I thought, “Wendy’s so nice! Maybe I should broaden my horizons.” She was kind enough to send me an advance copy of Girl in the Creek, and I am pleased to report that it was a fun, engaging read that didn’t give me nightmares. As I said, I don’t know anything about the horror genre, but if you had told me Wendy’s book was classified as something like “supernatural murder mystery,” I would say that sounds accurate too. It’s set in a fictional small town on the slopes of Mount Hood, and if you’re interested, here’s the link to the publisher’s page. If you’d like to support a local bookstore, here’s an affiliate link to the Bookshop page.

I have to agree with this sentiment, but I also don’t think I need AI to do my laundry and dishes, since I get a lot of good thinking done while hanging laundry and doing dishes.

I think I might have shared something about this a few months ago when I first heard about it, but Mustard, who was arguably made even more famous when Kendrick Lamar yelled his name during TV Off (and even more during the Super Bowl performance), now has a mustard collaboration with Heinz—Chipotle Honey Mustaaaaaard. (I have no financial interest or otherwise in this venture—I just think it’s entertaining. Also, did they argue about how many As they wanted to put in the name? “6!” “No, 5!”)

Why are frogs in kids’ books usually male? The Pudding did an amazing analysis of children’s books, and which animals we tend to characterize as male, and which animals we tend to characterize as female (including an experiment in which they asked 1,300 participants to finish a story that begins, “And then the bear said, ‘I must go to the river.’ Upon arriving…” to see which gender the participants assigned the bear.

Also, if you missed it last week, this is an actual coffee mug we just started making (clicking the link will take you to the shop page for the mug):

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I got quite a few responses to my post “A Regular Person’s Guide To Surviving An Ultramarathon” a few weeks back, so I decided to try to turn it into a YouTube video—which I just published yesterday. (video)

I might be a little late to the party here, but I finally finished Orbital by Samantha Harvey, and I was just telling a friend I regretted listening to the audiobook because it was so beautifully written that I wanted to spend more time with the sentences (which is kind of impossible unless you’re really skilled at rewinding an audiobook app). But if a short literary novel—ahem, award-winning, bestselling novel—about astronauts orbiting Earth sounds good to you, I highly recommend it. (Also, I have a theory that most books will eventually settle at about a 3.8-4.0 average rating on Goodreads, and I think I have to amend that to say that any book that’s nominated for the Man Booker Prize will settle at somewhere around 3.4-3.7, since just as many people seem to hate those books as love them). Here’s a link to the publisher’s page for Orbital, and here’s a link to the Bookshop page if you have a local bookstore you’d like to support.

There’s a lot of interesting info in this post from newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration about how frequently you should take in carbs during exercise, including the breakdown of five different strategies from small, frequent doses to large, infrequent doses, but I was very excited to find my own strategy validated by a very fast runner: “Ultrarunner Robbie Britton hits 90g/h by consuming a PF 90 Gel in two separate doses. ‘My method is a big gulp initially and then I finish whatever is left in another hit by the end of the hour.'” [Reminder: Clicking the above link gives you 25% off your first Precision Fuel & Hydration]

I started laughing my ass off at the 00:09 mark of this video, and then thought, “this video is 63 seconds long, what else could happen in the next 50 seconds to make it better?” and I gotta tell you, I did not expect this lady to walk up to this guy, and get the reaction she got from him, which made me laugh even harder, and also sort of restore my faith in humans.

I have now known Ed Roberson for seven or eight years, and in that time watched him go from “guy trying out podcasting” to full-time podcaster and emcee/public speaker. He told me years later that the first time we met in person in 2018, at our little condo in Denver, that it was the first time he’d ever used the recording equipment he’d set up on our kitchen table to interview me. Ed has been visiting Missoula the past three years in advance of the Old Salt Festival, where he interviews people on stage and leads panel discussions, and before the festival, he stays at our house for a couple nights. Since 2018, he’s interviewed a lot of big (and/or big-to-me) names, including Nick Offerman, Kristine Tompkins, Hampton Sides, and others, so there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, so to speak, between that first interview and the interview we did at my kitchen table a few weeks ago. Which of course is just two friends chatting about the same stuff we’d been talking about while Ed was helping me build Jay’s playhouse in the backyard the day before—creativity, learning to teach, making my Seven Summits of My Neighborhood film, and the male loneliness epidemic.

We’ve all been there, clicking on one new (wrong) thing and then the algorithm makes all sorts of assumptions about our interests, and, well, “Now my feed is 50% dudes with perfectly groomed beards explaining why modern society has emasculated men, 30% videos of people blending vegetables while talking about ‘ancestral nutrition,’ and 20% ads for supplements with names like ‘Alpha Beast Mode’ and ‘Primal Warrior Stack.’” —Michelle J, “I Followed a Life Coach on Instagram and Now My Algorithm Thinks I’m a Men’s Rights Activist With a Juicing Problem”

This is a brand anthem video for HOKA, which I guess is essentially a sort of ad, but I gotta say, it’s fucking great. Made me think I actually do love running, partly because of exactly what they depict in the video: community. Anyway, it’s two minutes, and I’ve watched it three times this week.

I was talking to my mom a few weeks ago about my feeling that my brother and I had one of the last small-town/suburban childhoods in America where kids rode their bikes around to each other’s houses to hang out (which ended in 1993 when we moved across the state into a house on a highway with a 55 mph speed limit). So I’m probably the target market for this nostalgic collection of photos of kids jumping bikes over each other, many of which look like they probably ended with some scraped elbows/chins/knees. (via Kottke. org)

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Wow did I love this 15-minute film about three L.A. cyclists who come from diverse cycling backgrounds and found each other to enjoy, as Dante Young puts it, “riding around in tight-ass clothes all day.” (video) (thanks, Brody)

This one-minute video was simply titled “Researchers react to first-ever photos” on the youseeingthisshit subreddit, and I watched it three or four times before I poked around to try to find more info on why these guys were so excited about this bird. The video is from 2022, shot on Fergusson Island, off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, and the bird is a Black-naped Pheasant Pigeon, which is a bird species that hadn’t been documented by scientists since it was first described in 1882—it was one of 20 “lost” birds that hadn’t been documented for more than 100 years. The guy with the camera is Cornell researcher Jordan Boersma, and he’s showing the video of the bird to local biologist Doka Nason. More info in this Audubon article, but the video itself is just a moment of joy. Like I am not what I would call a big “bird person” but I loooooove this video.

A few weeks ago, Zoë and I got to chat with Mike Ko, aka Kofuzi, for The Trailhead podcast, about his journey from regular guy to YouTube running celebrity, including the evolution from a “not that fast” runner (other people’s words, not mine) to sub-3-hour marathoner. In a move that was maybe kind of like wearing the band t-shirt to the concert or the bar t-shirt to the bar, I wore my “Non-Elite” hat for the video call (which was designed by Kofuzi and the folks at PATH Projects), which is still one of my favorite hats.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

I am starting to increase the distance of my longer trail runs to prepare for a big 5-day-long effort in early September, and the folks from newsletter sponsor Injinji thankfully sent me a pair of their Ultra Run Crew socks, which I am loving because of the extra padding for those longer-mileage days here in Missoula. If you’re looking for socks for running or hiking, clicking this link will give you a code for 20 percent off your purchase at the Injinji website.

There are only a few instances of profanity in this Substack piece about a really weird Airbnb experience, but if I were going to teach a class on how to use a few rated-R words exactly enough in your writing to be funny but not *too much *, I would use this essay as an example. (I think being able to write dialogue with a Scottish accent probably helps too)

This My Modern Met story is really just kind of a summary of a CBS Evening News story, but DAMN. Molly Shafer, a high school senior in a small town near Madison, Wisconsin, had friends when she was younger, but lost touch with many of them during high school, as she became a “loner.” But during her senior year, she decided to try to reconnect with them by painting portraits of 44 classmates. She spent about 13 hours on each one. The news crew interviewed many of the classmates for the short segment, and Molly, who said: “You can’t go through life thinking that you don’t have friends because they don’t like you, because that’s not the case. People aren’t thinking that hard about you. It’s all in your head. You just have to try.”

Boy did this Longreads story end up being way different than I thought it would be—the headline “Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists” really doesn’t even hint at the depth than you get when reading it. I particularly loved the list writing/writing exercise the author describes near the end of the essay. Also this bit: “Lists are how we fight chaos with ballpoint pens.“

Jason Chatfield has a wonderful Substack newsletter called New York Cartoons, and it was an honor for me to do a Substack Live discussion with him last week, as I consider him to be a real cartoonist (for the New Yorker and others), a real artist, and a real comedian. Also a really nice guy, in my experience meeting him for a quick coffee the last time I was in New York, which turned into, if I remember correctly, a several-hour, multi-coffee discussion with maybe some lunch too? Anyway, hell of a guy, loves to create and dig into the creative process, and we talked about everything from self-publishing books to road trips (he’s on one right now, in an RV somewhere south of Portland), to failure. If you’d like to watch our chat, here’s a link (we both decided to wear glasses for the interview, without discussing it beforehand?).

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NEWS FROM ME: As of today, August 1, we are opening up 25 more spots for the next session of my How To Tell One Story online writing course. So far, 180+ people have taken the course, and I’ve gotten tons of positive feedback from them. It’s six weeks, two emails per week (Mondays and Thursdays), each email containing a lesson, short video, and writing exercise that takes between five and 30 minutes. You complete the lessons at your own pace, and you have access to the lessons and videos as long as you want them. We’ll close registration after August 8th, or when the 25 spots fill up. (and psssst, right now it’s $50 off the regular price). Here’s a link if you’d like to check it out. 

I watched this video and thought, “maybe too weird for the newsletter,” and then I thought, “nah, maybe I’ll just share it anyway and the weird people will like it,” and then I watched it a second time and noticed the end credit that said “characters (and trumpet) by my son,” and the source drawings, and thought, “OK, maybe it’s not so weird, and just sort of cute in that little kid way.” But that’s me assuming the son is a little kid, so who knows. (video)

I was aware that people hike to all 48 of the 4,000-foot summits in the White Mountains, and I was also aware that people do all 48 of the summits, each one in each of the 12 months of the calendar year, but I honestly was not aware that people hammered out all 48 summits in one push until Gary C. sent me an email with this link to Andrew Drummond’s write-up of his latest attempt, which he finished in just under five days (!!!). Apparently people have been doing this since Reverend Henry Folsom put a route together in 1970, and did it over 19 hiking days (not consecutive). Anyway, the numbers to do it in less than five days are jaw-dropping (especially the final day, 59.53 miles and 19,678 feet of elevation gain).

We’ve been having Black Sabbath dance parties with our toddler since Ozzy Osbourne died July 22, and I saw a Popular Mechanics story (paywalled) about Ozzy’s genome sequencing showing that he was predisposed to hard partying and also surviving said hard partying, AND that he had some Neanderthal lineage. Which was pretty interesting, but this Psychology Today article explaining why his DNA won’t produce “another Ozzy” was even more interesting. So, RIP Ozzy.

I have, until this week, sort of assumed that a blood sugar crash during exercise was the same as “bonking,” and it took reading this article from newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration to realize that no, they’re not the same. If you take anything away from What happens when you ‘bonk’? (And how to avoid it!) by Andy Blow, let it be that you should not only enjoy eating more carbs in the days leading up to a big effort, but that it is actually, as my junior high basketball coach used to say, prior proper preparation preventing poor performance. (also note that clicking the above link will give you 25% off your first purchase on the PFH site)

I just realized this week that endurance cyclist Alexandera Houchin has a Substack, and the first thing I read—her reflections on her many experiences racing Tour Divide over the years—did not let me down. My favorite part: “In a society obsessed with finish line narratives, we mustn’t forget the starting line stories, too. For I believe the distance from the starting line is where the true spirit lies; where did you come from to get to that race start line? Now, maybe more than ever, I urge people to dream impossible things, to line up at starting lines, and tell their stories.”

I had such a blast talking to my friend Fitz Cahall a few weeks ago, and having a bit of a return to The Dirtbag Diaries after several years. This conversation, and what I guess is really my first poetry reading, started when I published the “Reminder To Touch Grass” poem back in February and Fitz messaged me and asked if I’d like to read it on the Diaries. (Which I of course said yes to)

Did I need NPR to tell me that the word “dude” is useful? No, but I did need NPR to tell me that scholars spent 20 years trying to pin down its origin, and published a 261-page book about it. Also, “even with the rise of ‘bro,’ “dude” still reigns supreme, according to a recent survey linguistics professor Scott Kiesling conducted.”

This is just a short video I found on the Maybe Maybe Maybe subreddit, of a guy being very good at his job, and having fun with showing tourists a good time, and also kind of showing off a little bit.

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Today is the last day to sign up for my How To Tell One Story online writing course! As of my typing this (Thursday afternoon), we still had eight spots available. Since I kind of messed up a funny video promotion I did for it on Instagram that had a discount code on it (long story), it’s $199 for everyone instead of $249. But, again, today is the last day to sign up, and the spots are filling. Here’s the link for more info. (We’ll open up another 25 spots the week of October 3-10).

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As a huge fan of independent movie theaters, I really enjoyed this breakdown of how they make it work financially—although no one featured in the video mentioned memberships, which our local indie theater uses to keep the lights on (I am of course a member). (video)

Great headline on this short piece from Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg’s newsletter: “The Most Underrated Performance Enhancer: Having Fun,” which is in the same vein of something I’ve told a lot of people when they mention the idea of starting writing a newsletter: have fun with it, or you’ll find yourself abandoning it because it feels like work. I believe Steve and Brad are writing more about success/winning, but I think we’re on the same wavelength (isn’t fun its own kind of success?).

I follow the PerfectFit subreddit, and it’s usually just mildly satisfying stuff that happens to fit together, but this photo delivers a whole story, and you can just imagine the relief: A woman lost her engagement ring on a cross country trip, found a month later in husband’s deodorant

I am sure there is more to this story of the late musician and Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer writing a letter to representatives for 2 Chainz in reply to their request for his permission to sample his song “The Old Dope Peddler,” but I think the writing itself is just *chef’s kiss*.

This is maybe not “inspirational” in the typical mostly-positive sense this newsletter usually embraces, but I have been thinking about it since I watched and saved it on Tuesday—I sometimes wonder if in 10 years, we’ll have retreated more into digital living, or if we’ll collectively say, “wow, this kind of sucks,” and rebel against it, doing more things in the “real world.”

Sometimes I look at certain pieces of art and wonder if they’d be as well-known if they were, you know, smaller—like Picasso’s Guernica, but 11 inches by 25 inches, instead of 11 feet by 25 feet. I’m not saying this hyper-realistic pigeon on NYC’s High Line is Guernica, but it is huge. (via Kottke)

The morning of my friend Nick Triolo’s book launch party at the library in Missoula a few weeks back, I invited him to join me on one of my twice-weekly runs on Mount Sentinel, since he hadn’t been in town for a while and we were due for a catchup. I of course totally forgot that a) his new book, The Way Around, was about circumambulation, which is kind of the opposite of summiting a peak, and b) my regular run route goes to the summit of Mount Sentinel. I of course remembered during the Q&A when he mentioned it in a sort of “hey, nothing against peak bagging” joke. We had interviewed him a few weeks prior for The Trailhead podcast, in which we talked about his book, and his 30-plus-race-finish ultrarunning career. Links to listen here:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Speaking of the Trailhead podcast, if you’ve been listening the past few months and would like to help us out by taking a quick 2-minute survey and share your opinions and/or recommendations, here’s a link to it.

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Did you know that you can respond to this newsletter (or recommend something for next week’s Friday Inspiration) by clicking “reply”? It’s true. I love getting replies, and I am able to read them all, and try to respond to them (but sometimes I can’t, which is a bummer, so thanks for understanding). (If you received this email from a friend, and would like to subscribe, please click here.)

I had a lot of fun figuring out how to make this 2-minute YouTube video about “the creative process,” which involved a) digging an actual hole, b) rigging a ring light in our shower just to shoot 10-seconds of GoPro footage of my feet, and c) spending way too long hand-writing all the subtitles. But I hope it hits home. (video)

 I was talking to a friend the other day about writers who can create great writing out of the smallest events. I was thinking of Bill Bryson, in one of my favorite passages he wrote, where he’s on a road trip, staying in a hotel in a small town in South Dakota (I think?) and he makes this incredibly funny essay about all the restaurants in town being closed, as well as the hotel dining room being closed for some private event, and he ends up just buying a bunch of candy bars from a vending machine and eating them on the hotel bed. And then yesterday I read this essay on Substack, about a barista writing someone’s name on a coffee cup, and the reaction the writer had, and it’s the same exact skill. So, my hat is off to Michelle? for this one. (Also, this video was mentioned in the comments, and I somehow had never seen it before.)

My friend Ed sent me this short blog from Seth Godin, Scarcity and Abundance, and it partly captures something I have been thinking about often, which is a mindset of scarcity vs. a mindset of abundance, and how much more I gravitate toward other people who believe they can “win” without other people having to “lose”—and of course, vice versa, how I’d rather just avoid people who think the only way they can be happy is if they somehow “beat” other people. And how we should all think about that sort of thing more (especially when driving automobiles?).

I am starting to make a packing list for a bigger adventure I’ll mention here in a few weeks (and in my next update for Patreon supporters), but I am psyched to be going somewhere I hope to have to pack a layer or two, including this 4.4-ounce wind jacket from newsletter sponsor Janji that I have scarcely worn all summer but am excited to potentially pull out of my vest when a cool mountain breeze picks up, fingers crossed. (Here’s a link the women’s fit version)

A while back, I started looking more and more to Reddit for interesting things to include in this newsletter, and I am not sure why I like it so much more than social media—maybe it feels more likely that I’m goign to find weird stuff, instead of things the algorithm(s) decide are successful? Anyway, it seems like every few weeks I find a new subreddit that I think is hilarious, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve encountered the WhyWomenLiveLonger subreddit, which appears to be mostly comprised of videos of men doing dumb things (which seem like they must quite often end in personal injury), but also this screenshot of a post that I think is hilarious, and doesn’t need a trigger warning.

Maybe you’re not in the space today that you want to look at a bunch of breathtaking astronomy photos in the shortlist of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, but I’m going to share the link here and mention that a) experiencing awe is good for you, b) the universe is incredible, and c) people who have mastered their craft to the extent that they can photograph things like comets, blood moons, and solar eruptions are inspiring.

I am not a running streak person, but I’m impressed by people who are, and even if I wasn’t, I think I’d have to admit that the presentation of the data of this person’s 10-plus-year running streak is kind of amazing.

Is this level of research about the best way to dice an onion necessary? It is absolutely not, but I love it when people go this hard on math and science for something as non-essential as dicing an onion, and then put some love into the presentation of it.

Finally, I posted these two poems to my Strava a few days apart, then realized that together they kind of made a fun little saga, so I created some image slides to put on Instagram. I thought I’d include them here, just in case you’d like to read about my attempt to get rid of an old radiator that had been partially buried in my backyard (which is the kind of content I assume everyone needs nowadays).

I saw this video somewhere on Reddit a few weeks ago and would have shared it here but I couldn’t verify that these folks actually went and retrieved the tire afterward—but it appears they answered that question in the comments on YouTube, so please enjoy this very satisfying three minutes. (thanks, Hannah and Dan) (video)

Hilary is a huge fan of Blackbird Spyplane, and I am a fan of the writing voice and general presence, although I am not as regular a reader as she is since it’s more about fashion. But this piece from two years ago, The End of Cool Small Cars, really resonated with me, as the owner of a 1979 Toyota Pickup and a person who has tremendous nostalgia for the old Chevy S10s and Ford Rangers of the late 1980s and early 1990s (not to mention my piece-of-shit two-door manual transmission Pontiac Sunbird). Especially this line:  “We can of course sense that, whereas road trips do rock, when it comes to daily commutes, etc., cars are prison cells masquerading as tickets to freedom.”

I am very susceptible to the formula of “Topic X written in the voice of a famous author,” and this piece, which published the same day Dune: Part Two was released, is right up my alley (and I don’t think you need to be that familiar with Bukowski’s work to enjoy it?): Charles Bukowski’s Dune

This is the third month of Injinji sponsoring this newsletter, and I am thankful for their financial support, but more than that, I am grateful for the many pairs of toe socks they sent me, which I have now subbed into my regular running sock rotation, which has increased morale on my long runs as much as a pair of socks can. The most recent addition was the tie-dye Courtney Crew socks designed by ultrarunning GOAT Courtney Dauwalter herself, who will be running UTMB starting next Friday and looking for her fourth win there. As far as these socks go, my thinking is, good enough for the GOAT, good enough for me. Here’s a link to the socks, and the code SEMIRADUTMB will get you 20% off all Injinji toesocks through September 5th.

I love artist Mike Monteiro’s newsletter—in every post, he answers a question from a reader, in an essay, and I don’t read every post, but for whatever reason last week, the subject line “How to Stay Hopeful” grabbed me. And I was delighted to find that his answer had a lot to do with walking, bikes, neighbors, and cities.

This is a long read, but I found it incredibly thoughtful, interesting, and insightful: Piers Gelly, an English professor at the University of Virginia, designed a course around the using AI to write, let his students decide and debate whether to use it in class, and to also decide if they’d rather learn from an actual human-taught class or by AI. A couple of the quotes from the piece that really hit home:

“We depend on a calculator to produce identical results no matter who uses it, but identical results in a writing context are boring at best.”

“ … because it’s exhausting to give a shit. My point wasn’t that they should give a shit, only that they could. The choice was theirs, as always.”

—Piers Gelly, What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom

The point of the DiWHY subreddit, you might assume, is to question why (some) people would spend time creating things that are (maybe subjectively) ridiculous, but I’d argue that all creative works could be viewed as ridiculous, and certainly a ridiculous way to spend one’s time. But come on, look at these customizable ripped jeans and tell me they were a waste of anyone’s time.

I believe I found Matthew M. Evans’ Fog Chaser substack a few weeks ago through a post by my friend Anna Brones, and I was just thinking about how much I liked the last song he’d put out, when I saw the new one from last week, and the story behind it: night sketch (for jd)

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I kind of think this idea—having kids dream up fairytale characters and then having those characters professionally designed—should happen more often? (video)

We are hopefully getting toward the end of fire season here soon-ish in the western U.S., but I thought it might be useful to share the app I use to track wildfires around Missoula during the summer and early fall. I’m sure many people have heard of it, but Watch Duty is a free app (which you can support for $25/year or even more if you want Pro features) and it is so far my favorite app for seeing fire info as soon as it’s available.

I got stung by a bee three times a couple weekends ago, which led to me doing some research on newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration’s website (seems unrelated, but stay with me): I was thinking back to the last time I got stung by a bee, the first day of a backpacking trip in the Sierras in August 2008, and I remembered that I also had woken up with a splitting headache that morning. I was concerned about altitude sickness, so I’d bought a gallon jug of water to drink on the long drive to the trailhead from the Bay Area, and as I maybe suspected but hadn’t confirmed, that was not the correct strategy. I read this piece, How to START hydrated and why that’s so important, and now realize I probably drank myself into some mild hyponatremia. I was fine, but I would have rather not had the headache, if I’d known better. Anyway, within the PFH article are guidelines for pre-hydrating (with proper amounts of sodium, thanks to research, including some NASA research), and if you shop at the PFH site through that link, you will get 25% off your first order.

This is so cool—this photographer used Google Street View to locate 250+ signs hand painted around Detroit by Ron Miller of Ron Signs, who has been doing it since 1978, still doesn’t have a website or email address, and works entirely by word of mouth around the city. (Here’s a page on Andrew’s website for better viewing, and here’s the post he put on his Instagram)

I have not eaten many Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes, but I do kind of love how it’s influenced chefs at non-fast-food restaurants to create their own version of the dish. As Eater writer Khushbu Shah puts it: “Trends tend to trickle down from fine dining to fast food  … the Crunchwrap Supreme is one of the few, rare examples where a trend traveled the other way, working its way, over the past 20 years, to the menus of beloved independent restaurants.”

I don’t know how these bumper stickers about Tacoma ended up in my feed, but I particularly love the “TACOMA: Come for the rain, stay because your car got stolen” one, as well as some of the more r-rated ones.

I am not trying openly hate on AI (although I am a little weary of hearing about it so much for the past couple years), but as an avid em dash user, I did take it kind of personally when I found out people were saying that usage of em dashes was a sure sign something was written by AI. I have no authority to say that’s bullshit, but I have to say this essay by Brian Phillips warmed my little em dash-loving heart: Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please

There’s a really great bit about the carnival vs. the circus in this piece Marty Brodsky wrote about going to the county fair, and I’d just excerpt it here but I think you’ll be way happier if you just read the whole piece instead. Also, semi-related, since Marty talks about the demolition derby at the beginning of the piece: My friend Nick’s uncle won two different demolition derbies in northwest Iowa back in the day with the same car. Consider that for a minute—not that the car actually survived one demolition derby and was still drivable afterward, but that he WON both of them.

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Well, today is the 500th edition of this Friday Inspiration newsletter. Aside from a couple of short breaks (one for some time off in 2021 and the other for the first few weeks of Jay’s life back in 2022), I’ve been doing this every week since November 20, 2015. Which is a long time. If you open this email every week or every once in a while, thanks for reading. If you are supporting this whole operation via Patreon or a paid subscription, thank you again for your support—if it weren’t for you, I’d quit, because, well, bills.

If you’ve always wondered what it’s like to feel the satisfaction of helping keep independent art alive and also would like to hear what’s going on behind the scenes, here’s a link to my Patreon, where you can support for a couple bucks a month. I might be so bold as to say that the writing publication of 500 of these things is a pretty good sign I’ll show up next week, and the week after that, and so on.

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I was listening to this live set from Fred again.. and this really catchy bit caught my ear, maybe even sounded familiar, so I looked it up and it turns out it was Fred remixing a tune by one of my favorite artists, Valerie June. Here’s a link to the song, and here’s the full set (video):

There are multiple things that just dropped my jaw when I listened to this really brief Atlas Obscura podcast about The Earth Room. For example: a) an artist put 280,000 pounds of dirt in a 3600-square-foot apartment, b) the apartment is in Soho, meaning its real estate value is in the millions, c) it’s been there since 1977, and d) that I had never heard of it before. (If you’re not able to listen to the podcast, the transcript is a good quick read.) Oh, and you can visit The Earth Room—here’s the info.

Austin Kleon shared this link to a clip of photographer Noah Kalina calling his dad—who is a psychologist—and asking him (as a psychologist) about ups and downs in creative energy/creative blocks/creative burnout, and I have to admit, it hits home for me. On one hand, I’ve always been a big fan of the Lorne Michaels quote about Saturday Night Live, that “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” On the other hand, I have definitely forced it before, and have had a lot of weeks in the past few months that felt like a lot of work to get something decent out there. (Here’s a link to the full 11-minute video.)

These shots are incredible, but I think made even better when you know a bit of the story of how long these photographers waited/planned/did math so they could get the shot. It would be really interesting to hear what they said about how they felt when they finally got these shots, and how they dealt with finally getting something they obsessed over for years.

Based on the title (“Always read carefully”) you might kind of know what’s coming by the time you’re about 10 seconds into this clip, but this podcaster’s co-hosts’ laugher really brings it home in that sort of “we are very comfortable busting your chops and sometimes we don’t even need to say anything when you self-own this effectively.” (From the Contagious Laughter subreddit)

We interviewed runner and writer Sarah Lavender Smith on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, and it was such a blast for me to hear from a real person in their mid-50s who recently struggled to get through the Hardrock Endurance Run when things didn’t go her way at all. It was also a blast to read some of Sarah’s writing about the race back to her on the podcast—including the passage about vomiting fire. If you’d like to give it a listen, here are the links:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Only somewhat related: Sarah also recently posted on Substack a link to a New York Times piece about “men leaving fiction reading behind,” and asked if any men who followed her were still reading fiction. I didn’t read the article, but I of course was in the middle of reading a fiction book at that point and said so. Then I looked back and realized I’ve read quite a bit of fiction this year, so I thought I’d share the titles here.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

Parade by Rachel Cusk
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

The Dispossessed: An Ambigiuous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin
Publisher’s page | Bookshop

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I have enjoyed many of Arthur Brooks’ columns for The Atlantic over the years, so I wasn’t surprised that this video, “You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why.” hit home for me as well. Sometimes I wonder if we’re all keeping ourselves so “busy” with everything that we don’t have time to feel anything anymore—boredom included, but also other things. (video)

I don’t know who the market is for this app, or if the market actually exists, but I love that this person created it: A Chrome extension that adds dust to your browser tabs the longer you’ve had them open, starting at about 3 hours.

Hilary shared this Substack piece with me and although I don’t see myself in everything the author says about running culture and numbers contests, I definitely agree we could all use a reminder about perspective—like I know a lot of people who run very long distances in the mountains, but I am also very aware that everyone at the starting line of an ultramarathon is probably the “weird runner person” in their family/office/neighborhood. I loved this bit: “That’s why I say: think of 2K like 20K. A small run after a workday is already a victory. Getting yourself moving, even briefly, is a powerful act in a daily life that already exhausts us.”

True story: One time when I was living in my van, I met up with my friend Mauricio one morning to scramble up the Third Flatiron in Boulder, carrying a harness and a small tagline to rappel off the top when we were done. We hiked in, climbed the easy route to the summit, and only when I opened my pack to pull out the harness and rope did I realize that I’d carried my MacBook Pro in the backpack’s laptop sleeve the entire time. This incident was the first thing I thought of when newsletter sponsor Janji sent me their new Revy Pack, an 18-liter backpack designed for running, and also run commuting (you can slide either a 15″ laptop or a 2-liter hydration reservoir in its separated compartment). I have not put a huge amount of weight in it so far, but I have run with a laptop, rain jacket, and water bottles in it, and I have to say, I’ve been liking it.

My friend Jason Tyler Burton is releasing a new album, and his Kickstarter went live for it last week. You might be into it if you like Jason Isbell and/or John Prine—here’s his Bandcamp page for a sample of his work, and here’s one of my favorite (older) songs of his, which I think he put out a year or two before I first met him and his wife Jenn, in Springdale, Utah, more than a decade ago: A Garden Grows. (Funny story: Hilary and I asked Jason if he’d play guitar at our wedding + wedding reception, very chill, just whatever he felt like, but we asked him to cover one song, which he had to learn, Nick Jaina’s Sebastapol, and play it as Hilary and I walked down the “aisle” after the ceremony. For whatever reason, I basically have zero memory of him playing that song, and I don’t think any video recording of it exists, but I’m sure it sounded amazing. )

Mike Sowden, in this piece, delivers a clinic on how to follow your curiosity to create something really interesting. He goes from this sentence: “Unfortunately I have no idea how birds work.” To: “In fact, as my research in a local library uncovered that afternoon, birds are supremely useful to long-distance walkers. Here are four ways how.” And then, guess what, four really cool things about birds!  I remain a huge fan.

We interviewed Denverite and ultrarunner Junko Kazukawa on The Trailhead a couple weeks ago, and the episode went live this week. I have to say, while doing the interview, I was really struck by how casually she talks about her running career—she ran her first 100-mile race, the Leadville 100, at age 48, just after her second bout with breast cancer, and she’s still cranking out ultramarathon finishes  at age 62 (including this year’s Bighorn 100 in Wyoming). It was a really inspiring chat, and I think might make you wonder if you’re actually younger than you feel, no matter how “old” you are on paper.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

I had a blast co-teaching the Freeflow Institute Grand Canyon writing workshop this past April, and I am both happy to share that there will be a second Grand Canyon workshop in April 2026, and sad that I’m not going to be teaching next year (I love the Grand Canyon and I love Freeflow workshops, but it was too much time away from my little guy). But Craig Childs and Sherwin Bitsui will be, and I bet it’s going to be amazing. If you’re interested, more info is here, and applications are due by September 17, 2025.

Do you need to look at a huge map of the entire Star Wars galaxy? Sure you do. Why am I not surprised (but still awed) that they created this? I love humans. (via Kottke)

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I watch way too many of these NBA highlight collection videos, and I know not everyone likes basketball, but I love this one for a couple reasons: a) The conceit of the video, “Dunks but the dunker gets increasingly more unlikely,” is actually backed up with each person’s statistic of “dunks per season,” and b) many of these clips show the reactions from the team’s bench, from the teammates who are often baffled and elated that their teammate threw one down (video)

Ultrarunner (and fellow Montanan) Jeff Garmire has been attempting the self-supported fastest known time for the Appalachian Trail for the past 40-some days, and if I am reading things correctly, he is still on pace for the record as of Thursday afternoon. He’s doing this to rains money for The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ+) young people, and the fundraising goal is $10 for each mile he’s hiking/running, or $21,970. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about the fundraiser and/or donate, and here’s a link if you’d like to track his progress (if I’m doing the math correctly, he should be finishing sometime before Monday morning).

As a very recent convert to the church of putting winter tires on my vehicle, I appreciated this very simple explanation and graphic about winter tires from the folks at OpenSnow.

I don’t read every single email I get from the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, but I try, and occasionally I read one that’s just perfect for that day, like this one Ada Limón wrote about a small moment she witnessed on a subway platform: While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

I was just running with a friend a couple weeks ago and talking about—and I wish I could sound smarter than this, but I can’t—how cool the moon is. Like if the moon had a fan club, I’d join. And I think the guy who made these plaster models of the moon’s surface back in 1874 (!!!!!) probably would have joined it too.

The PhotoshopRequests subreddit is often people asking to have photos of someone edited for a funeral or memorial, or people asking to have an ex-partner removed from a photo, but occasionally it’s something like this guy whose young cousin left her bike at his house and would like people to take the photos of him riding her too-small bike and turn them into him “doing something cool,” an opportunity for hilarity to ensue, and I hope he shares a bunch of these photos with his cousin.

I’m sure there have been dozens of articles written about Robert Redford’s best movies since he passed away this week, but I liked this one, because it reminded me of a couple (to me) less-obvious films he acted in: Spy Game, and Old Man and the Gun. (I’d have to add Sneakers as one of my sleeper Robert Redford favorites, though.)

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I spent a good chunk of the beginning of my book Ultra-Something talking about the movie Rocky, so of course when this CinemaStix video about it popped up in my YouTube feed, I of course watched it, and of course was not disappointed (although I did already know the bit of trivia about the skating rink scene). (video)

I am a big believer that you don’t have to have gone to film school to make films, and that you don’t have to go to art school to make art, and that you don’t have to have an MFA (or even a college degree) to be a writer, but it sure feels nice when someone smart says it, so here’s Linda Carroll’s piece “The magic of self-taught writers”

I did not know I needed to read this profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (although I am interested in his new movie, The Smashing Machine), but as Jason Kottke put it, “Sam Anderson” can write. I laughed out loud at this sentence, which is a master stroke in how to use punctuation to make a joke: I do not need to introduce you to Dwayne “Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson” Johnson. 

I got to meet with newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration CEO Andy Blow and COO Jonny Tye last month, a few days before Jonny was to crew Dan Jones, who was running the UTMB. Afterward, I thought, “I should have asked Jonny if he’s ever kept track of all the food he eats while crewing,” because that (to me) would be really interesting. Fast-forward a few weeks to me reading the “Crewing 101: How to crew an endurance athlete” article on the PFH website, scrolling to the end, and found this chart comparing the nutrition intake of Chris Myers, who took 5th in the Western States Endurance Run, and Brad Williams, who helped crew Chris (it looks like Brad was a little under-nourished, in my opinion):

I clicked on this link, When Bruce Lee Trained With Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and was delighted to see it had been written by Jeff Chang, who wrote one of my favorite hip hop history books ever, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. The article tells the story of the friendship between the two men, which started when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a junior at UCLA, who had just won the college basketball championship. I didn’t realize until the end that the piece is actually an excerpt from Chang’s new book, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, which is also exciting (but is also going to cost me $35).

I have a vague memory of this thing happening when I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros on the original Nintendo, but had not idea it was a “glitch” that inspired many other secret glitchy features in video games for years afterward. (thanks, Ed)

I think Keith Haring’s art is still relevant, and if you don’t believe me, how about this bit that Jillian Hess dug up from Keith Haring’s Journals? “Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The worlds of art and money are constantly intermingling. To survive this mixture the magic in art has to be applied in new ways. Magic must always triumph.^”

I am writing this post a few hours before I go to the theater to see One Battle After Another, so all I can say about this long read about the film is that it made me even more excited to see it. I didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson walked out of film school at NYU because a professor snobbily dismissed Terminator 2: Judgment Day as an unserious movie, but that makes me like him. Also, this line: “It turns out that the answer to the thought experiment of whether a director already widely canonized for the consistent quality of his craft can handle the sort of massive budget more often handed over to hacks is—resoundingly—“yes.”

Marty Brodsky and I met maybe eight or nine years ago, I think at an event I did at the Boulder Bookstore, and I’ve been following his writing ever since (I have included several of his recent Substack essays in this newsletter). He reached out and asked for any advice I might have about self-publishing, since he’s starting to go down that road and self-publish a book, and I said, “Would you be up for a Substack Live conversation?” So we did that yesterday. Here’s a link to the recording.

Apologies if you are a longtime fan of ARIatHOME and will wonder if I live under a rock, but I somehow just discovered him this week, and I kept going “no way” every time a new person got on the mic and rapped or sang—especially the two “Brooklyn OGs” who appear around the 10-minute mark. As a commenter on a different video said: “According to these videos, every single person in NYC can spit hot fire at a moment’s notice” (video)

I loved this collection of photos of the writing spaces of authors who have made the 2025 Booker Prize longlist because (in my opinion) not a single one of them would be featured on anyone’s Pinterest page or Dwell Magazine or whatever. One of them is a couch, one of them is a bench, no one has more than one monitor, one has a view of the next-door neighbor’s shingled roof—I mean, they’re all so humble. (via Kottke)

I don’t think I’m as much of a slow lane enthusiast as the author of this New York Times Letter of Recommendation, but I love this piece because of the evolution of the author’s approach to driving because I had the same revelation about speeding a few years ago—if you’re trying to make up time, it’s really hard to make the math work in most cases, no matter how fast you drive. [GIFT LINK]

I saw a video of an Instagram influencer giving his bus driver a Rolex yesterday, which is a nice thing to do, but I couldn’t help thinking how much cooler it would have been if the guy had just given the bus driver the watch in private instead of making it into a piece of content. Maybe that’s what I like so much about this story about Ludacris ordering spring rolls at a restaurant—it genuinely happened, and makes you think Ludacris probably just acts like this all the time.

My friend Ben Polley wrote this piece on who lives and who dies after getting lost in the backcountry, and there’s a bunch of fascinating stuff in it, including this bit from the chief of county search and rescue here in Missoula: “there are two main categories of outdoor emergencies: those that involve meeting a schedule and those that involve pleasing another person.”

I read my friend Ed Roberson’s Good News from the American West newsletter every Wednesday, and I have never done this before, but I’m just going to copy and paste what he wrote about this story about a first ascent of a big rock climb along the Salmon River:  “Here’s a cool story about  a “wild and crazy” first ascent in Idaho—one that required hiking 22 miles, swimming 3.5 miles of whitewater, ascending an unclimbed wall, then floating back to civilization in a boat full of friends.”

I am not usually interested in videos with titles like “Shocking police brutality in Ireland,” but this was posted on the ContagiousLaughter subreddt, so I figured I could chance watching all 30 seconds of it, and I’ll tell you, it delivers, and does not need a trigger warning. (I mean, I guess it is technically a “dirty joke,” as far as that goes.)

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TODAY is a big day—we are re-opening registration for How To Tell One Story, my online writing course. We sold out the last round of 25 spots back in July, and I just this week finished up reading the stories the folks who completed the course sent me (pretty much the highlight of my week). If you’re interested in writing, or really, putting together a story in any format, you can register for the course from today (October 10) through next Friday (October 17). We’re going to do the $50 discount again this time, and we’ll shut down the page once we hit 25 registrations. You’re probably about to spend some money on holiday gifts for people in the next couple months—maybe get yourself a little gift now? (If you miss this round, we’ll open registrations again in February). Here’s the link: How To Tell One Story

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I loved this little film, using the words from the poem “An Ongoing List of Things Found in the Library Book Drop, Usually Being Used as Bookmarks” by Sam Treviño, and showing the whole thing from the librarian’s perspective. (video) (Also: here’s the original poem the film was based on)

This was of course written in response to current news, but I honestly think you could do endless variations of topics written in the voice of Animal from the Muppets and I’d read it and laugh. But this was pretty great: “AAAGGGHHH!!!” A Memo from Animal, Your New Editor-in-Chief

I’m not interested in using AI for the stuff I create, but I’m also not that interested in spending my time shit-talking it or people who use it. That said, when artists I respect comment on the whole moment we’re in with all of it, I am interested in what they have to say. So I read this piece/cartoon by Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) when it landed in my inbox, and I definitely agree with a lot of what he says here—not so much the insults directed at people who evangelize about it, more the “talent vs. skill” stuff.

I’ve been following Hallie Bateman since back in 2017 when I bought one of her “Creative Licenses,” which were literal licenses, wallet-sized plastic cards saying you were licensed to do creative stuff (with a hand-drawn portrait of you), so I loved this illustrated story of how trying a new pen made her an artist. I mean, who among us hasn’t bought something we hoped would change our lives? Often more expensive than a nib pen and ink.

I am a fan of José González because he makes wonderfully music that I find grounding and calming, but also because he once told a story during a live performance I was watching on YouTube, and the point of the story was that someone fell asleep during one of his shows, and he kind of laughed it off and said something like “they were having a different kind of spiritual experience.” Anyway, I found this rework of his song “Broken Arrows” by Portico Quartet and I looped it for about an hour yesterday—maybe you’ll like it too, even if you don’t listen to it 12 times in a row.

I have linked to Anne Kadet’s Substack here before, because I love how she takes her experience as a journalist and follows her curiosity to things in New York, bringing the reader along as she breezily navigates whatever topic she’s decided to research, interviewing people in what feels like very casual conversations. So when I saw she went to the world’s longest footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100-Mile Race in Queens, I had to read the piece she wrote about it. It’s great. And if you aren’t familiar with the race (I mention it in my book Ultra-Something), it takes place around one city block, around a high school.

This guy was out on a trail run and a barred owl swooped down and stole his hat right off his head! Isn’t that crazy!?!? OK, you know what’s even crazier? It happened a second time the next week, on a different trail! Not sure if it’s the same owl, who just loves messing with this guy? Below the carousel of photos in this Reddit post is a link to the video where you can watch it happen.

If you missed getting one of the “What Does Your Urine Say About You?” water bottles we made this summer, we have a few extras we ended up making to fulfill the minimum order quantity. Grab one now for the person on your holiday gift list who would appreciate a good joke about pee? I don’t know.

Today is the LAST DAY to sign up for my How To Tell One Story online writing course for 2025. If you haven’t heard people (me) talking about it before, it is:

• a six-week, 12-email course designed to help you get one good written narrative nonfiction story on the page
• comprised of brief emails and assignments (a 3- to 6-minute read plus a 10- to 30-minute writing exercise)
• proven to be very satisfying according to the 27 people who have taken the post-course survey (and the 180+ other people who have taken the course and complained about it)
• usually $249 but $199 this time around
• only offered every three months

If you’re interested in more information and/or signing up for the course, the deadline is 11:59 p.m. MST tonight (February 17th)—here’s the link to the course page.

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Please meet Naoki, a Japanese fly fisherman who has dedicated his life to old reggae records (and fishing for tarpon), who says this partway through this short film: “This is part of my adventure of my life. I’m still working on it.” (video)

I am not good at cooking eggs (I am trying to get better at it), so when I see a video titled “Egg master flow-state” and the thumbnail is 12 freshly-cracked eggs on a restaurant kitchen’s flat-top, I’m going to watch it. Some people enjoy watching professional golfers who are the best in the world at what they do; I enjoy watching professional egg-cookers.

I was an on-and-off listener to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast over the years, and I was kind of shocked to hear that a) he was ending it and b) it had been going on for 16 years. Here’s a quick tribute The Atlantic published [GIFT LINK], which contained this quote: “[T]he platform Maron helped create—the low-key chat show—has exploded into an industry worth billions. Comedians of all stripes now host back-and-forth chats, though few display the compassion Maron is known for.”

Last week, I finished reading Ruth Whippman’s book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, because Hilary picked it up a few weeks earlier and sold me on how thought-provoking it was. She also hosted a four-week online “book club” with a bunch of moms (and our friend Jonathan). In reading the book, I had the dual perspective of being a dad of a toddler and as a man who grew up in some pretty traditionally “masculine” spaces. So Hilary and I both have our dog-eared copies of the book and a date night coming up so we can chat about it uninterrupted by (MOM!) our (MOM!) little (MOM!) guy. You are not invited to our date night, but you can get a sense of some of her dogeared pages/underlined sections in the last Substack she wrote about it: Why Don’t I Call My Son “Sweetheart?”

On Wednesday, I had my first run of the fall season in which I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe should have worn pants for this one,” and while I vastly prefer running in shorts, I live in western Montana, where we definitely have a “pants weather” season. So I will be wearing the Trail Tights from newsletter sponsor Janji because they’re nice and also because they have SEVEN POCKETS. The Women’s 7/8 Trail Tights have five pockets. (both of them come in reflective prints, which I am quite excited about for the dark mornings and evenings that are coming soon)

We interviewed writer Jared Beasley on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, which required me to read his book The Endurance Artist, which was fantastic, as was our conversation with Jared, who is a real writer who knows what the hell he’s doing, and who was willing to put in the work to get to know Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, the quirky (to put it lightly) guy who dreamed up the hardest footrace in the world, the Barkley Marathons.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts

I remain a huge fan of Brandon Stanton and his Humans of New York work, and could not be more excited that the project has grown to the point that he can take over Grand Central Station, remove every single ad, and choose from more than 10,000 of his portraits to put on an exhibition starring everyday/extraordinary folks he’s interviewed. (via Kottke)

This Blackbird Spyplane piece Hilary sent me yesterday echoes something I have quoted my friend Forest as saying to me once, a piece of advice that lives rent-free in my head—You don’t look cool looking at your phone. My favorite part: “This is the real cure for “phone addiction” that no one has considered. Forget lightphones, forget apps that lock you out of other apps. Humans are a deeply image-conscious species. Just think about how dumb you look when you’re on your phone, and how you would never willingly look that dumb by any other means.”

Also: If you missed my post yesterday about celebrating 10 years of running ultramarathons, here’s that, and if you’d rather just watch a video about it, here you go:

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