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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“Who’s gonna watch a senior citizen grandmother do jigsaw puzzles on a platform where people are competing playing Warzone?” Apparently a lot of people. (video)

This math about budgeting at the bookstore of course makes no sense but is exactly what most of us do when we want something, and that is why it is an example of a well-written joke.

I finally subscribed to Blackbird Spyplane yesterday after Hilary sent me this piece about creativity and AI and making birthday cards for people, as there were so many good lines in it, but especially this one: “‘You can get rich if all you want to do is get rich,’ my mom, a law-school dropout, told me, but I’d only be happy if I did something that really mattered to me.”

The folks at Injinji are sponsoring this edition of this newsletter, and it’s kind of great timing, because it’s starting to get cold here in Missoula and I’m just going to keep running through the winter again like I did last year and the year before. And: Injinji just introduced a Snow Crew sock for winter running, same five-toe design but with Thermolite EcoMade fibers for insulation. I wore them on my run yesterday, which was 28 degrees (Fahrenheit) at the beginning, which felt way too cold right now but that I bet will feel balmy when I’m wearing these socks in January.

I saw this puffy jacket Aldi made to look like a giant baked potato on Kottke .org and immediately thought Hell Yes That’s Great, and then I clicked through to the website and saw the silver rain poncho it comes with. I hope some people who really, really love baked potatoes end up with these jackets.

In 2025, four of his novels and two of his short stories were adapted into shows or movies, so Stephen King wrote about that for LitHub, and of course he said a whole bunch of really thoughtful stuff and never once said anything about the money he’s made, which, when 100-plus movies and shows have been created based on your work, is probably quite significant.

I assume, maybe not incorrectly, that if you subscribe to this newsletter, you appreciate the diversity of links I dig up every week—short videos, microblogs, long essays, and the occasional piece of internet media that only takes 1.5 seconds to appreciate, such as this post in the oddlysatisfying Subreddit titled “My Neighbor’s Tree Fits Perfectly In My Window.”

Austin Kleon recommended in this piece George Saunders wrote about the dilemma we all (probably) have with art made by people who are or have become problematic, and I found it thought-provoking but also comforting, in some way. It’s worth a read. This was one of my favorite bits: “I find that my life is simplified if, when I’m tempted to have an opinion, I ask myself why I need one, and what I aim to do with it. If there’s nothing to do with it, I try not to get too worked up.”

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May your inner physics nerd (and chemistry nerd, too) keep you sucked into watching this entire video from 1987, which just keeps going and going, even though at times it looks like the chain reaction is millimeters away from being upset, and maybe that’s why it’s so compelling. (video) (thanks, Eric)

A hundred years from now, when historians are looking back at the communication styles we developed in the first couple decades of social media, I really hope they are able to access the many, many jokes that have been written in 280 characters or fewer, including this one, which I am sure will pop up in your head every time you put on a shirt for the rest of your life.

Speaking of social media: I forget where I found a link to this essay titled “How to end your extremely online era,” before I read the whole thing, not so much for the tips on how to spend less time scrolling, but for the observations and banger lines like these two:

• “I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.”
• “Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.”

I had to count, but it’s been six months since we wrapped up our Freeflow Institute course in the Grand Canyon, and I continue to be glad that Eliot Treichel joined us for his second Freeflow course, even though he’s a published author and professor of English, because he put together this wonderful write-up about his experience on the trip for NRS’s Duct Tape Diaries.

We interviewed Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, for The Trailhead a few weeks back, and just published the episode this week to coincide with the publication of his book, The Running Ground. I didn’t say this in the interview, but I am not usually drawn to books about people getting faster at running road marathons, but the book held my interest in that exact thing, as well as the stories Thompson pulls into the narrative, about his father’s tumultuous life, his battle with cancer, and his efforts to balance his ambitions of being a good partner and a good dad, having a successful career, and running his fastest marathon in his mid-40s.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

If you are at all moved by a very specific nostalgia for the computers/technology/aesthetics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, you may (as I sometimes do) scratch that itch with the r/cassettefuturism subreddit, which is full of photos of that sort of stuff, like this 1965 photo of the reception desk at the General Motors Technical Center, or this set of photos of the Brutalist design of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco from 1973.

Maybe you’re paying attention to the World Series this year, or maybe not. Maybe you did or didn’t know that Game 3 went to 18 innings. Either way, here is a wonderful essay about staying up too late to watch the conclusion of that game, and I don’t think it’s spoiling it to say that the essay includes a mention of (and the trailer for) Invasion U.S.A., a Chuck Norris movie with a 22 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I have a number of new designs for coffee mugs and t-shirts that I’m trying to get out before the holiday shopping season starts ramping up (I can’t believe I’m saying that already, I apologize), and I whipped this one up a while back when I was flogging myself trying to write something about something and of course struggling mightily with it. Which reminded me that no matter what people on LinkedIn say, the creative process is never straightforward, and I don’t think it should be. Anyway, maybe someone in your life would like this mug that says “Please Do Not Question My Creative Process” (and by “someone,” maybe I mean “you”):

I think I was vaguely aware of Track Star before my friend Pitt sent me this video, in which Jack Coyne plays songs for MC Serch to quiz Serch on his hip-hop knowledge—but I hadn’t ever watched one. Now I’ve watched a few of them, but I think this one is still my favorite because of the enthusiasm Serch still has for the music and the culture. (video)

This is a great story about making time to write, and sometimes making desks to write on, and also about stealing—well, maybe not stealing if it’s during down time at the job—time to work on creative stuff, even if it’s not paying your bills, or paying at all. (thanks, Mario)

I don’t know why but during a couple conversations I’ve had with friends in the past few weeks, the question “Is running cool now?” has come up. I am not saying I have a strong opinion one way or another, but it had definitely not occurred to me that it was cool now. (Maybe because I run, and I am not cool?) And then Hilary sent me this essay titled “Running Isn’t Cool,” and I thought it was really interesting, especially this part: “To run is to be seen trying. To be seen sweating and snotting and grunting and wanting. To be vulnerable. A moving testament to humankind’s endless search for meaning through suffering. Running a marathon is thus, by definition, uncool.”

A few weeks ago, I was looking for new José González songs on Apple Music and found a rework of his song Broken Arrows by a group called Portico Quartet, and I immediately put this song on repeat for about 35 minutes. Then I started digging around YouTube to look for more of their stuff, and I found this wonderful video of them performing their Terrain album at Studio One at Abbey Road, and now this is all I want to listen to when I’m working, and I imagine it will be like this for several weeks.

I am excited to be working with the wonderful and hilarious folks at Precision Fuel & Hydration in 2026 and will be cooking up some fun stuff with them in the coming months, not the least of which is their continued sponsorship of this newsletter, and my continued consumption of their products on a weekly basis, my current favorite of which is this big bag of Carb & Electrolyte Drink Mix. Now that the temperatures are dropping a bit here in Missoula, I am running shorter distances and needing a few less carbs and electrolytes, so I’ve been doing one scoop of this mix in each water bottle before I head out on my runs up Mt. Sentinel, and I’ll tell you, it’s just about perfect. If you’d like to check it out, this link will give you 25 percent off your first order (or about $8 off a single bag of this mix).

We went to see Ross Gay speak at the University of Montana last week, and I don’t know the last time I have been so happy to be in the same room as someone whose art I love. (Actually, that’s a lie, I do know—it was Rakim, on his book tour in 2020, with my friend Syd) I decided a few weeks before Ross came to Missoula to go ahead and read the remaining books he’d written that I hadn’t read yet, all poetry collections and one epic poem about Dr. J. That night on campus, he was exactly who I thought he would be, a true joy, and I would have stuck around to high-five him after and maybe ask him to sign a few books, but we had a babysitter and had a feeling Jay wouldn’t let her put him to bed, so we took off, and I decided I would go ahead and continue being the enthusiastic evangelist for his work that I have been since 2021. So I searched around for an excerpt of one of his books that I thought was perfect, and here’s one about loitering, from the Book of Delights.

I thought the best part of this video clip was the clearly offended chef saying, “if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike,” but then I think the show hosts’ reaction of basically choking on the food in their mouths because they’re laughing so hard was the best part, but then the hosts are trying to obscure the mess they’ve just made and trying to hide while also still laughing, and then I started reading the comments and realized this saying has many versions, including “If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a truck,” and I kind of want to adopt this saying for myself now.

This Korean guy became a Detroit Pistons fan basically completely randomly, but then fell in love with the team and gradually became a die-hard fan, and then he saved up a bunch of money to make a trip to Detroit, and then a second trip to Detroit, and I’ll tell you what, Detroit loved this guy right back, and it’s a great story.

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The students of Shanti, a driving instructor in New York, have a 99-percent success rate, and Shanti has been doing this for 30 years. I love everything about this short film (and it is also a shining example of how to use profanity in storytelling, in my opinion). (video)

This clip on the r/oddlysatisfying subreddit begins with this guy talking about how his car is 58 inches wide and his garage is 60 inches wide, and my first thought was, “how does he get out of the car after he drives it into the garage?” Now, the person who wrote the headline for this post was mainly excited about how smoothly the car slid into the garage, but I gotta say, watching this guy get out of the car was just a goddamn delight.

Having now dropped my phone onto actual rocks while trying to put it back in my vest after taking a photo twice in the past week, and realizing this unfortunate event might have been prevented by wearing gloves with some actual grip on the palms and fingers instead of some minimalist liners I’ve been wearing since 2020, I just ordered myself a pair of these Revo Merino Liner Gloves from newsletter sponsor Janji, which I am going to assume will solve all my phone-dropping problems for the next few months, and perhaps help with other tasks requiring at least a modicum of dexterity.

I wasn’t interested in this article titled “Is the Look Good, Play Good Theory Real? A Ringer Investigation” because I am into NFL football, but I have heard GOAT ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter say “Look good, feel good” many times before, and that’s why I clicked. I was pleasantly surprised by the data, the methodology, the writing, and really some of the shit-talking that occurs in this piece. I am happy that in a world where everyone says journalism is going to hell, someone is paying for stuff like this.

I have never seen a gravestone with a recipe on it, but Rosie Grant has seen a bunch of them, and has compiled 40 of them into a book called To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. Which is in itself interesting and inspiring in the art sense, but reading this article and learning a bit about the research Grant did for the cookbook, and tracking down the deceased recipe writers’ surviving family members, was fantastic.

I’m sure there were many words spilled about the 50-year anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—the actual ship sinking, not the Gordon Lightfoot song—but when this newsletter from Niko Stratis, “The Gales of November remembered,’ landed in my inbox, I trusted it would be fantastic. Her essay alternates between the history of the shipwreck and the song, and a car accident she survived, which is the style of much of her book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman (which I read in May 2025 and won’t shut up about)—great music writing about a song + great memoir writing about chunks of her life. (Also: I have done many laps of this live Punch Brothers cover of “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and I bet you will too)

There are two video clips in this post, and the documentary trailer is great and all, but what’s even more interesting is the second video, a clip from the movie in which you can (like I just did) how the word “podcast” came to be.

My friend Nick goes to a coffee shop every year on Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday (November 11) and reads Vonnegut books, which is a tradition I wish I had thought of first and will perhaps join in next year, or whenever Jay reaches a grade of school in which he doesn’t have Veterans Day off and stays home with us. Nick did include one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes about writing voice, “I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.” If I may, though, I would like to tack on the next couple sentences Vonnegut wrote: “What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.”

Also: If you missed yesterday’s newsletter, here’s my new video about the Tour du Mont Blanc:

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NOTE: Like I said last week, I’m not doing a Black Friday email—this is a regular Friday Inspiration email! But if you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see a bunch of images and links to stuff in my DFTBA shop, some of which may be appropriate for someone on your holiday shopping list. There was something funky about the links I put in last week’s email, and that has been fixed this week (sorry about that!). 

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If you haven’t seen One Battle After Another yet, this has a spoiler near the end (with a very clear warning beforehand), but what is not a spoiler is the explanation that no one involved in this film knew what the ending was going to be before they started shooting the ending (!!!)(video)

This article about the people who are still studying to be black cab drivers in London in the age of Uber is inspiring in the fact that passing the exam called “the Knowledge” is ridiculously hard, but it also gave me this strange sort of hopeful feeling, that maybe not everything we do as human beings is going to be replaced by tech that we think is great but ends up becoming, as Cory Doctorow termed it, enshittified. Like yeah, you could just use an app, but instead you’re taking on this nearly superhuman feat to memorize 25,000 streets in London and imprint the city map on your brain. Incredible. I’m rooting for this guy Besart to pass the test when he takes it. [GIFT LINK] 

Toe Socks! Newsletter sponsor Injinji is having a Black Friday sale through December 1 and a bunch of their socks are up to 50% off. I poked around a little bit yesterday afternoon and a couple of my favorites were still available (and marked down). The discounts vary per size and color, so it’s worth doing a little bit of clicking. Here’s the link to shop the sale.

I have only had one person ever tell me that they “didn’t do small talk,” and I don’t remember where our conversation went after that, but I definitely remember wondering about it afterward. Like where’s the line between small talk and big talk? Do you just launch right into the deep stuff with everyone? Baristas, cab drivers, the person next to you on a flight? I mean, I’m not like trying to push talking about the weather on anyone, but I definitely found myself nodding at a lot of the lines in this short piece, ‘It’s incredibly useful’: why small talk is actually great

I should have shared this last week (although I’m pretty sure I shared it last year or the year before?) but this recipe is one of my favorite fall/winter/cold weather/oh who am I kidding, anytime recipes, created by James Beard award-winning chef and ultrarunner Gregory Gourdet. Also, it’s super-easy: Brussels Sprouts Roasted with Kimchi and Scallions

Delete This Later is one of my favorite Substack newsletters, because of humor, not because it has anything to do with outdoor adventure or exercise. BUT! This week’s post is about getting into a kayak for the first time ever, and it reminded me that yes, kayaking is in fact difficult if you’ve never done it before. And can also be funny.

We interviewed writer, professor, and runner Lindsey Freeman for The Trailhead podcast that published this week, and one of my favorite observations of hers that we talked about was how running is one of the few really socially acceptable things you can try hard at in public (because it’s inherently hard compared to, say, drinking coffee).
Apple Podcasts | Spotify

For no real reason, back in 2021 and 2022, I talked Hilary into watching every film in the Fast and the Furious franchise with me. I think I just thought it would be worth studying a movie series that was at that time going on 11 movies. Plus, I told her, Roxane Gay is a huge fan of the franchise (yes, that Roxane Gay). I found out yesterday through reading this excerpt that a new book about the series, Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World, came out this week, and I immediately thought a) I’m going to buy that book and b) I wonder if Roxane Gay is going to read and review that book on Goodreads? [Here’s a link to Roxane Gay talking about how much she loves the series, back in 2015]

And now, Stuff In My DFTBA Shop That May Be Appropriate For Someone On Your Holiday Shopping List:

The 2026 Semi-Rad Running Calendar (only 34 left as of Thursday morning!)

What Does Your Urine Say About You Nalgene Bottle (only 21 left as of Thursday morning!)

This Fucking Sucks… Mug

Please Do Not Question My Creative Process Coffee Mug

Hope, According to My Dog Mug

Practice Maximum Enthusiasm Hoodie

Ask Me About Free High Fives Shirt

The Zen of Training Shirt (Put In The Miles So You Can Put In The Miles)

Of course there are more mug designs, t-shirts, posters, and signed books—?to see the whole collection, click here?.

An update from me as we enter the final weeks of 2025: As you may already know, this newsletter is supported financially by my friend Don. And Brian. And Julie, Scott, Kim, Travis, Adam, Charlotte, Zachary, and a bunch of other people who kick in a few dollars a month on my Patreon or through paid Substack subscriptions. I am grateful and privileged to be able to create the things I create for a living, and it’s because of the support of those people that I’m able to continue. I always joke about “having to get a real job,” but that’s something that’s always in the back of my mind—hanging up the weekly writing for a steady paycheck. THANKFULLY, for now, I have Don, and Brian, and other folks, and, maybe this year: you? You can help keep this newsletter going via Patreon for $3 a month (or more if you’d like), and you’ll get my monthly members-only Patreon update, in which I share lots of behind-the-scenes stuff about upcoming projects, things I’ve learned over the years, and my annual book recommendations (coming in a few weeks!).

If you get some joy out of this newsletter and you’d like to get yourself a gift for 2026 called “Making Sure the Semi-Rad Newsletter Keeps Coming,” please click this link to check out my Patreon. Thanks again to everyone who’s been supporting my work for the past few years.

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I honestly was not expecting this video to go as deep/thoughtful as it did in four-ish minutes: Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms? (via Kottke) (video)

Maybe you are familiar with ultrarunner John Kelly, who has, among other achievements, finished the Barkley Marathons not once, but three times. Maybe you aren’t familiar with him. EITHER way, his grandmother, Stella, is turning 100 years old, and John put a post on Instagram saying she would love to receive some cards, including a brief bio of her and her address (Stella Kelly, The Glen at Oak Ridge, 200 Bus Terminal Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37830). I have a stamped and addressed card sitting on my desk right now, waiting a few days closer to the holidays to send it.

I broke out the microspikes for a lap up Mount Sentinel yesterday, and it was quite lovely, snow falling, the quiet trail, a very stiff breeze blasting my sweat-soaked wind jacket as my route went from the leeward side of the mountain to the windward side. It felt like my first real winter weather run this season, and I realized that I have no idea how my hydration needs change when the temperature drops, so I looked up a few articles on newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration’s website. This one, Why hydration still matters in cold climates and how to nail your strategy, by Katie Elliott, ski mountaineer and founder of Elliott Performance and Nutrition, was pretty eye-opening, even just for the fact that, ahem, did you know you actually pee MORE in cold weather? (FYI, clicking the above link will give you 25% off your first PFH purchase)

Any interview with Ethan Hawke is pretty much clickbait for me, but even if you’re not a huge fan of his work, I highly recommend listening to the two minutes starting at 10:39, where the conversation turns to why movies about regular people are important (this link will start the video at exactly 10:39).

I love this idea for this book: Sure, we know who paid for the Empire State Building to be built, and we know who the architects are—basically the rich people who were involved—but how about the actual workers who built it? The ones in the old photos we’ve all seen, roughneck daredevils (?) standing on exposed steel beams hundreds of feet above Manhattan, 40 years before OSHA was created. This article about the new book, Men at Work: The Untold Story of the Empire State Building and the Craftsmen Who Built It by Glenn Kurtz, is really intriguing. Also, did any of those guys ever drop a wrench from up there? Because that would be bad.

This is a super-long poem, but I was guessing from the title, “we acknowledge ourselves,” that it was a take on land acknowledgements, and once I started reading, I wanted to see where Iñupiaq poet Aisa Akootchook Warden was going to take it, and I was not disappointed.

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this until my friend Glen sent it to me last weekend (thanks, Glen), but National Geographic Explorer and journalist Paul Salopek is walking across Africa, Asia, North America, and South America, retracing human migration from Africa. If I am reading the incredibly detailed and extremely well-produced website correctly, I believe he has just left Japan and  is now on a ship crossing the Pacific Ocean.

I have not read that much Charles Bukowski, but damn, this is a really interesting piece about the most inspiring thing he ever said—which was in response to a journalist asking him what he thought about a library in Finland banning one of his books because someone complained that it was vulgar.

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Lastly: If you’re still looking for gift ideas, we still have some of these available in my DFTBA shop:

Bears Don’t Care About Your Problems (signed copy)

Grand Canyon Subway Map poster

I Hate Running and You Can Too (signed copy)

The Periodic Table of the Elements of Adventure poster

What Does Your Urine Say About You? Nalgene bottle

I was not prepared to learn so much about the human body when I started watching this new-to-me video about why kids don’t get cold as easily as adults do. But if you have five minutes to watch this, prepare to be armed with several pieces of information that will make you sound really smart. (video)

I linked to this series in December 2024, and totally forgot about it until the emails for this year’s series started popping up in my inbox again this December. There are still 12 days of it left, each one an essay on the topic “I thought about that a lot,” written anonymously and published once a day. Here’s a bit from the December 9 essay, “In 2025, I thought a lot about my body in numbers”: “What I’ve learnt is that I didn’t need extraordinary willpower. Just the steady motivation of wanting to feel better, and the awareness of what was at stake if I didn’t.”

I’ve loved having Janji as a newsletter sponsor in 2025, and really enjoyed trying out different pieces of gear as the seasons change, and my routine changes. Recently, I added in some strength training a couple times a week at the gym near our house, and I am happy to report that I have not injured myself yet (probably due to my very cautious approach to increasing weight/resistance). And of course I run to the gym, and run home. I’ve been wearing the Janji Circa Daily Tee, which is a blend of cotton, polyester, modal, and spandex, that I’ve worn for running, casual wear, and now to do barbell squats. The short-sleeve versions are pretty much sold out (so I’m not wrong!) but several colors are still available in the women’s long-sleeve version and the men’s long-sleeve version.

I am a huge fan of Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” one of my favorite books about how to write, and I saw this note by her pop up on Substack, read the first line and thought, “Fuckin Anne Lamott. Why is she always so right?”

This is probably more for people who have read a book to an infant or toddler in the recent past, but I was laughing out loud at Jae Towle Vieira’s writing in this Defector piece, “Here Is What Reading To My Child Has Done To My Brain,” commenting on the slight and not-so-slight absurdities in children’s books. Such as: “Before I had a kid, I questioned the need for the abundance of Wheels on the Bus variations. Now I understand that there is no upper limit to the ideal amount of things that could happen in threes on buses. All day long, all through the town—a la Speed, it doesn’t matter what we’re doing as long as the bus keeps going.” [GIFT LINK]

Like every other social media platform, Reddit often feeds me stuff I would have been better off not seeing, but I feel the most in-control of my feed there, so I keep going back, and often the local Missoula subreddit provides me with actual useful information (new restaurant/power outage/warning about something), or just a laugh—like when someone posted a photo of this tree that’s in one of our local nature areas and asked if it had a name. And now of course every time I go for a walk there, I’ll say, “There’s ol’ Don Quattro.”

We are very close to announcing the dates and location for my 2026 Freeflow Institute writing + trail running workshop, so my friend/Freeflow Institute founder Chandra Brown having been talking a lot of logistics lately, and somehow she did not mention this story she wrote for The Guardian about what happened to the body of a 40-ton whale that washed up on a beach in Anchorage in November 2024, and the guy who was determined to get it off the beach and into a museum. (and yes, the exploding whale of Florence, Oregon is mentioned in the story)

This essay is a few months old, but I found it after reading another piece the author published recently, and the headline “The slow death of firsthand experience” pulled me in. It gave me a lot to think about, and I realized I have wondered something similar, but as it relates to online writing, i.e. how much online writing is just reacting to or interpreting things or thinking about things, vs. telling about an actual experience (or even just making an actual real-world, non-screen-time experience part of an essay about something).

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As 2025 winds down, I’ve been revisiting all my Friday Inspiration newsletters from the year and picking out my favorite links from each of them. I was going to do one “best of 2025” post at the end of the year, but there was a lot of good stuff, so this week’s Friday Inspiration is a collection of my favorites from the first half of the year, January through June 2025.

First things first, though: I convinced newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration to put together a sample pack of my favorites from them, tried and true for me over the past year and a half. This link will give you 15% off the sample pack, which includes a box of 10 packets of PH 1000 electrolyte drink mix, 3 PF 90 gels, 3 PF 30 caffeine gels, and 4 PF 30 chews.

Onto the best of the first half of 2025 then:

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This is not exactly new, but WOW, building a scale model of the timeline of the history of the universe in the Mojave Desert—in a day. (video)

From a short but brilliant essay titled, “You might just have to be bored,” subtitled, “Or: How to fix an attention span”: “Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.” (January)

I have been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, after reading about a study that showed we all basically think the best everything happened when we were approximately 10 years old. So of course I clicked on this piece, “Your brain is lying to you about ‘the good old days,’” and the science behind why we think things were better in the past. And it applies to how we think about progress, and improving society, but I think also, specifically this passage, how we remember things like mountaineering, endurance events, and all things “Type 2 Fun”: “Thanks to ‘selective memory,’ humans have a tendency to forget negative events from the past and reinforce positive memories. It’s one reason why our feelings and memories about the past can be so inaccurate — we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant glow. The further back the memory goes, the stronger that tendency can be.” (January)

I found Robin Wilding’s Substack this week through her post about putting her senior dog down (which was wonderful but maybe not what everyone needs to read this week), and I clicked around a bit and found this gem she wrote last September, The 11 Traits of Utterly Unfuckwithable People. My favorite might be #5, They Treat Servers Nice. (February)

I assume that you, like me, have had no less than one thousand instances in your life in which you had a weird or awkward conversation/confrontation with someone, walked away, and spent the next few minutes/several hours thinking, “you know what I should have said to that asshole?” If my assumption is correct, I think you will find Michael Estrin’s latest quick story very satisfying (and also hilarious). (February)

I have been trying to put my finger on why algorithms just don’t work that well to introduce me to new music/books/videos/shows/whatever, and I think lots of people are having the same feeling. This Atlantic piece about the new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, dives into a bit of it, but also captures what I think many of us have been feeling: “Like so many other products influenced by machine learning, Spotify’s playlists can’t generate something new—say, a wholly fresh and unheard sound—for its users. They instead offer the flash of recognition, rather than the mind-scrambling revelation that comes only when you hear something you’d never expected.” [GIFT LINK] (February)

I don’t know how I stumbled on Mike Monteiro’s (non-Substack) newsletter, in which he answers one question every issue. But this one, answering the question, “How do you decide which donut to get?” begins thusly: “First off, congratulations on your donut. Donuts are fucking amazing and everyone should have a donut. Some of you might be thinking about donuts and attaching the word “deserve” to it. Fuck that. Deserve has nothing to do with donuts. You want a donut. You should have a donut.” (March)

David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is one of my favorite reads of the past five years, maybe because it validates my tendency to try lots of things instead of just one, or maybe because it encourages us to go ahead and be real human beings with multiple interests—like he does in this recent piece, “Why Hobbies Are An Advantage, Not a Distraction.” (March)

I think there’s a pretty easy response you could have to people who say things like “empathy is a weakness,” and certainly there were probably many, but the phrasing of this one was my favorite. (April)

This is a Substack post about paper (and really, using paper and writing utensils to think), from a writer I’ve never read before encountering this piece, and it just made my week. Because, I don’t know, I love paper too? And wish I used it more than I use my laptop and iPad. The author writes in the intro, “Also, the world needs way more mundane blogging,” but I don’t think this is mundane, and it also reminds me of the best advice I give myself when I’m stuck trying to come up with something to write about: Go smaller. Stop trying to solve the world’s problems and just write about something small. (April)

Love this display at a college library: Is it Kendrick Lamar or Shakespeare? (Subtext here: Is Kendrick the Shakespeare of our time? Was Shakespeare the Kendrick of his time? If they met, would they get along?)(April)

If you have a) ever tried to move a photo within a Microsoft Word document and b) somehow not seen this yet, I believe you will feel quite validated, and probably also laugh at this seven-second masterpiece. (May)

I love finding good writing, and I think I kind of suck at describing why it’s good—like this essay by Niko Stratis, whose work I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter. Her essays are always fascinating, weaving together music, culture, and scenes from growing up in the Yukon and becoming a journeyman glazier, and discovering her gender identity. Anyway, her new book, The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, came out on Tuesday, and this week’s essay is one of my favorites I’ve read of hers, maybe partly because I also put songs on repeat for an hour sometimes. (May)

Trust me: Take 60 seconds, or 90 seconds (OK, maybe more like three to four minutes) and scroll through the photos created by the winners of the Milky Way Photographer of the Year Awards (via Kottke.org). (May)

I have mentioned before in this newsletter that I have been enjoying the live DJ mixes I often find on YouTube, but I think the production of this one might be my favorite yet: camcorder footage, a few different angles, a little bit of video editing, and a bunch of R&B tracks (and some live drumming). Plus the title is “the homies mixing R&B and chilling with a pineapple.” (May)

Years ago, I was climbing a multi-pitch route with a French friend who was pretty fluent in English, and we paused at a belay to eat a snack and drink some water. Simon pulled a small stuff sack from his pack and from the stuff sack a few food items, including the most battered energy bar I had ever seen. He held it up and said to me, “Theese ees my friend. He goes weeth me everywhere.” I of course understood exactly what he meant, as I, like every one, had the one bar that I kept bringing on hikes and climbs, but never eating, because I had better options. It was like an emergency ration that I kind of knew I would never eat unless I was on the verge of starvation. If you know what I mean, you will love artist Cy Whitling’s latest comic, “The Eternal Granola Bar.” (May)

I was clicking through Substack yesterday, wanting to find someone who wrote an actual story, a narrative of something that happened in real life. It wouldn’t have to be anything spectacular, just a story. And I found it. It was titled “I Agreed to Help Pick Up a Couch and Ended Up Participating in a Street Performance” and it made my day. If you read it, I am betting you will say to yourself, “Yes, I know or have met someone like Moonbeam.” (May)

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. (June)

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. (June)

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)(June)

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If my Friday Inspiration newsletters made your 2025 a tiny bit better, please consider keeping it going in 2026 by supporting my work through Patreon here.

As 2025 winds down, I’ve been revisiting all my Friday Inspiration newsletters from the year and picking out my favorite links from each of them. I was going to do one “best of 2025” post at the end of the year, but there was a lot of good stuff, so this week’s Friday Inspiration is a collection of my favorites from the second half of the year, July through December 2025.

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I wrote a whole newsletter about Listers the day after I watched it this past fall, and the gist is, “I didn’t care about birding before this film, but I could not stop watching this 2-hour film about two brothers who decide to get very into birding for an entire year.” (video)

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. (July)

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. (July)

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. (July)

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?). (August)

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?). (August)

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*. (August)

I love artist/designer 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. (August)

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. (September)

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) (September)

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 (September)

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.” (September)

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.” (October)

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.) (October)

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. (October)

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.” (October)

Maybe you’re paying attention to the World Series this year, or maybe not. Maybe you did or didn’t know that Game 3 went to 18 innings. Either way, here is a wonderful essay about staying up too late to watch the conclusion of that game, and I don’t think it’s spoiling it to say that the essay includes a mention of (and the trailer for) Invasion U.S.A., a Chuck Norris movie with a 22 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (October)

This is a great story about making time to write, and sometimes making desks to write on, and also about stealing—well, maybe not stealing if it’s during down time at the job—time to work on creative stuff, even if it’s not paying your bills, or paying at all. (thanks, Mario) (November)

This Korean guy became a Detroit Pistons fan basically completely randomly, but then fell in love with the team and gradually became a die-hard fan, and then he saved up a bunch of money to make a trip to Detroit, and then a second trip to Detroit, and I’ll tell you what, Detroit loved this guy right back, and it’s a great story. (November)

I used to read Dave Barry’s column when it was printed on newspaper that was delivered to my parents’ house in the 1980s and 90s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and I saw that he started a Substack a while back but I intentionally didn’t click on it because I wanted to preserve the Dave Barry of my childhood as he was. So: Thanks to Emily for sending me this Dave Barry piece about the exploding whale of Florence, Oregon, in 1970, which, as I learned in this story, will soon be the subject of a short documentary, and even though it’s been 55 years, I think it will be quite relevant to our current times. (November)

This article about the people who are still studying to be black cab drivers in London in the age of Uber is inspiring in the fact that passing the exam called “the Knowledge” is ridiculously hard, but it also gave me this strange sort of hopeful feeling, that maybe not everything we do as human beings is going to be replaced by tech that we think is great but ends up becoming, as Cory Doctorow termed it, enshittified. Like yeah, you could just use an app, but instead you’re taking on this nearly superhuman feat to memorize 25,000 streets in London and imprint the city map on your brain. Incredible. I’m rooting for this guy Besart to pass the test when he takes it. [GIFT LINK] (November)

Any interview with Ethan Hawke is pretty much clickbait for me, but even if you’re not a huge fan of his work, I highly recommend listening to the two minutes starting at 10:39, where the conversation turns to why movies about regular people are important (this link will start the video at exactly 10:39). (December)

I have not read that much Charles Bukowski, but damn, this is a really interesting piece about the most inspiring thing he ever said—which was in response to a journalist asking him what he thought about a library in Finland banning one of his books because someone complained that it was vulgar. (December)

This is probably more for people who have read a book to an infant or toddler in the recent past, but I was laughing out loud at Jae Towle Vieira’s writing in this Defector piece, “Here Is What Reading To My Child Has Done To My Brain,” commenting on the slight and not-so-slight absurdities in children’s books. Such as: “Before I had a kid, I questioned the need for the abundance of Wheels on the Bus variations. Now I understand that there is no upper limit to the ideal amount of things that could happen in threes on buses. All day long, all through the town—a la Speed, it doesn’t matter what we’re doing as long as the bus keeps going.” [GIFT LINK] (December)

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If my Friday Inspiration newsletters made your 2025 a tiny bit better, please consider keeping it going in 2026 by supporting my work through Patreon here.

This is a fun idea, and as someone pointed out in the comments, probably one of the safer things Red Bull has sponsored (thanks, Hilary) (video)

I don’t know what it is but something in these Illustrations from “The House Of The Future” scratched a nostalgic itch for me, probably involving photos of humans using jetpacks and flying cars in a school textbook when I was in third or fourth grade.

Gabe Bullard moved to Switzerland and found himself suddenly caring very much about the snails he saw everywhere. My favorite few lines from this piece: “I asked Estée Bochud [who manages the Natural History Museum’s malacology collection] if moving snails like I was doing might cause them stress. She said it seemed fine, since snails can start on an adventure and not realize what they’ve gotten themselves into until it’s too late. I understood the feeling.” [GIFT LINK]

Someone linked to this piece, Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life, somewhere, and I apologize, but I forgot where and can’t track it down, so apologies to that person. I can say that I am now thinking of things as Thick Desires vs. Thin Desires: “The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.” (via Kottke)

I imagine this [satire] headline will resonate with you if you have ever done laundry in your life: Study Finds Missing Sock Will Only Appear Once Matching Sock Has Been Executed

This appears to be a tweet from 2022 but I am laughing at it and considering doing it myself.

I read this story that Hanif Abdurraqib wrote on Instagram sometime just after Christmas, and I am pretty sure the reason I’ve read four of his books is because I assume Hanif Abdurraqib moves through the world like this all the time, and probably tells stories like this all the time too. But don’t take it from me, take it from the 17,000+ other people who clicked the heart icon on this post.

I am still cranking out episodes of my new podcast, My Favorite Things, and the latest episode is an interview with my friend, writer and running coach Mario Fraioli, who snuck in a couple extra favorite things into our chat, which was fine by me (also, Mario would like it noted that his audio settings were off and he sounds “like a chipmunk”).

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QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT: Next Tuesday morning (January 13), we are opening registration for my 2026 “Running to Stand Still” Freeflow Institute writing + trail running workshop. It’s June 7-12 on Homestake Pass in Montana (10 miles from Butte, a couple miles from the Continental Divide Trail). We run every day (as a group, so not fast), we do two workshop/discussion sessions each day, and we eat lots of good food. This workshop sells out every year, so if you’re interested, send your email address to me at brendan@semi-rad.com (or you can just reply to this email) and I’ll send you an email when registration opens on Tuesday.

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I really appreciate that in the sea of “I DID X EXTREME THING” titles on YouTube, I got served this 13-minute film of this guy snorkeling in a river in Alabama in December, freezing his hands and feet (in a wetsuit) to create a very chill video of some nature, including this line of commentary: “It was pretty sweet to watch this colorful crustacean just straight up vibing in his natural habitat in the creek.” (video)

I figured this T Magazine photo feature titled “Our Favorite Home Libraries” would showcase a bunch of fancy, uncluttered Dwell Magazine-approved beautiful spaces, and sure, a lot of these are really pretty, but a few of them look like the books are doing a hostile takeover of a living space, and I appreciate that. [GIFT LINK]

I mentioned this once before the end of 2025, but newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration has put together a sample pack of all of my favorite products so you can try the gels, chews, and electrolyte drink I use. I mean, I didn’t win any high-profile ultramarathon races last year—or any races for that matter—but I did run 1500+ miles and cranked out 300,000 feet of elevation gain, without getting a single cramp(!). (I believe this link will give you 15% off the pack, but if not you might have to manually enter SEMIRAD26 in the discount code spot when you check out)

This is a really vulnerable piece of writing about body image and breast explant surgery, by writer and runner Sarah Lavender Smith: I Need To Get Something Off My Chest

I was never a massive Star Trek fan aside from watching reruns of the original series as a kid in the 80s, but damn if I didn’t love clicking and dragging around these 360-degree panoramas of the interiors of some of the ships of Star Trek. (via Kottke)

The r/ContagiousLaughter subreddit always delivers for me: Seeing how many capes I can put on my client before she notices

This list of every U.S. state’s “loneliest road” was fun for a couple reasons—the methodology, the fact that I saw my pal James Q. Martin’s name in it (as the person they asked to “judge” the 10 most scenic routes out of the list of 50), and the photography (although I’m pretty sure one of the photos is of Interstate 90 through Utah, which is not very lonely at all, in my experience). And also that the loneliest road in Iowa goes right through my parents’ hometown of Emmetsburg, where I spent many days as a kid.

The Ringer has put together a 64-member “Ultimate Traitor Bracket,” including traitors from movies, books, and real life, and they’re already onto the Final Four, but I thought I’d link to the Sweet 16 post here, because it’s just fun to see who they put in it: LeBron James, Prince Hans from Frozen, Fredo Corleone, Cypher from The Matrix, Scar from The Lion King, Iago from Othello, the list goes on.