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Read the full post at - America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom” In the beginning, there was public right of way - the freedom of movement between amongst property. And then, America decided to mandate a specific vehicle for the public right of way above all else -> America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom”
Read the full post at - The Individuals Who Championed Each National Park Over the past few years, I've been able to visit a few of America's National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and other public lands in addition to reading several excellent histories. For the Parks that I've visited so far, it seemed like there was an outsize influence of either single individuals or small groups in getting the…
Read the full post at - 3 Useful Radio Resources for Streaming Live Even in a world of Spotify, YouTube, Podcasts, etc I still think radio is deeply underrated as a communications...
Read the full post at - The End of an Era [for Writers] via Hugh Howey I thought this post was an evergreen take amongst the white hot discourse -> https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/
Read the full post at - A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory for Why the World Feels So Weird Derek Thompson interviewed Agnes Callard about the idea of the unicontext. I thought it was a useful framework for thinking...
Read the full post at - Roadless Rule Area Interactive Map I don't love posting about current events, but this resource is timeless -> https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/roadless-rule
Read the full post at - 5 Reasons You Should Use Mozilla Firefox for Your Browser If you actually care about an open web, about real privacy, about making sure one company doesn't control the entire internet - Firefox is still the only real choice.
Read the full post at - TIL about Prairie Remnants This infographic from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota explains how much of the Earth's prairie ecosystem we've lost over the past couple of centuries. More than 70% of America's Great Plains have been lost to development, and what is left is all in pockets.
Read the full post at - TIL about the International Union for the Conservation of Nature s land classification system What I did not know is that in 2008, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature - a UN-like body* - decided to create a formal system that countries can use to systematically conserve lands based on management objectives. It's very similar to the US system, except that…
Read the full post at - TIL About The Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service Exhibit 5000+ that Jimmy Carter was a brilliant President was deliberately slandered by Ronald Regan -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Conservation_and_Recreation_Service
Read the full post at - Clearing Blowdown on Conasauga River Trail The most satisfying parts of volunteering with a Forest Service Trail Crew (specifically the amazing Cohutta Wilderness Trail Volunteers) is the direct connection between work and result.
Read the full post at - Doing More is Often Easier Doing more is often easier -> https://www.raptitude.com/2025/04/doing-more-is-often-easier/
Read the full post at - The open web as gift economy Beautiful essay -> https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/27/the-open-web-as-gift-economy-part-4/
Read the full post at - It s All a Blog. It s All a Post. A newsletter-shaped-blog, or a blog-shaped-newsletter? -> https://buttondown.com/blog/blog-vs-newsletter
Read the full post at - Lewi Blake Remote Bikepacking Adventures on YouTube Lewi Blake is a travel vlogger unlike anyone I've ever seen. He's just an independent guy with some camera gear, a sense of storytelling, a skill for editing, and the wherewithal to post it to YouTube.
Read the full post at - Kids Freedom To explore This is why kids are on their phones. They aren't allowed to do anything else whether by law, by parents, or norms. -> https://ifstudies.org/blog/new-ifs-brief-more-screen-time-less-play-for-americas-kids
Read the full post at - The Case for Blogging in the Ruins An excellent blog post on why blog posts are best -> https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/
Read the full post at - The Counterintuitive Way To Get Better At Anything via Barking Up The Wrong Tree Love this -> https://bakadesuyo.com/2026/05/get-better-at-anything/
Read the full post at - Inflation but Only In Human to Human Services I love a good chart. This chart shows two major economic trends. First, Baumol's Effect which is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Read the full post at - The Upper Middle Class Trap via Nick Maggiulli I see this everywhere -> https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-upper-middle-class-trap/
Read the full post at - The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls by Adam Bonica This -> https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-looks-permanent-until-it
Read the full post at - 40 Little Sayings That Have Held Up Over 40 Years I ve been around for a full 40 years now. I, like everyone on Earth, still have no real idea about...
Read the full post at - The Wonder of Modern Drywall by Yassine Meskhout We take the modern world completely for granted -> https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-wonder-of-modern-drywall?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZ_F90_8PNfpEYF00xv8NJPA
Read the full post at - Flannery O Connor Predicts The Internet Troll Flannery O'Connor had possibly the keenest eye for the characters we meet in life. This passage struck me as either ahead of its time...or just timeless.
Read the full post at - 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry This is so true -> https://interconnected.org/home/2026/02/06/sanding
Read the full post at - Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and the Reading Unlock Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and the Reading Unlock -> https://www.readtrung.com/p/warren-buffett-and-the-reading-unlock
Read the full post at - What the actual science says about brain rot I love the channel Howtown on YouTube. They do an excellent job wading through academic research on trendy topics. This piece on "Brain Rot" is especially apt for the 2020s.
Read the full post at - Where Do the Children Play? via eli Stark-Elster The biggest misconception about American childhood -> https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play
Read the full post at - Why read novels? via Dynomight Love this -> https://dynomight.net/novels/
Read the full post at - Salaam Springs at Grant Park Salaam Springs (aka "The Pond") is the main only water feature in Atlanta's Grant Park. It's not huge and it's more of a stormwater catchment than a landscaped lake TBH. However, it was re-built re-landscaped a few years ago with a viewing deck, a working water fountain, and native plants around the edge.
Read the full post at - A World Appears by Michael Pollan Pollan has a rare talent. He goes beyond journalism into something harder to name — a deep, patient synthesis of science, history, and lived experience that makes even the most tangled topics feel useful and graspable. He did it with food in The Omnivore's Dilemma. He did it with drugs. And A World Appears is him doing it with the biggest,…
Read the full post at - The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord Debord's central argument is that the "spectacle" goes well beyond what most of us picture when we hear that word — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a presidential election. He argues that any representation of the world that turns people into passive spectators qualifies.
Read the full post at - A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk is one of the Top 5 best novels I've ever read.
Read the full post at - Appalachian Trail Backcountry Shelters, Lean-Tos Huts by Sarah Decker Sarah Decker went out and photographed and documented every single shelter on the Appalachian Trail — all 2,200 miles of it. The result is a beautiful, deeply niche reference book that, for the right reader, is an absolute treasure.
Read the full post at - Conasauga River in Summer Conasauga River in Georgia's Cohutta Wilderness, Chattahoochee National Forest
Read the full post at - Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger is a coffee table reference book put out by Rizzoli. I've collected nine of these Rizzoli books now, and they're all lovely — the kind of thing you keep on the coffee table not as decoration but because you actually flip through them.
Read the full post at - Miracles & Wonder by Elaine Pagels Pagels is one of the original researchers of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and a lot of the Coptic and Gnostic texts that scholars are still working through today. She's been doing serious, primary-source work in this space for decades. I did not know she was still actively publishing so it's genuinely impressive to see her add another…
Read the full post at - A History of the World in 500 Walks by Sarah Baxter The premise is straightforward: if history happened in real places, you can go stand in those places. And when you do, history stops being a mental movie and starts feeling like what it actually was — real people, real terrain, probably a lot more boring and weird than your imagination gives it credit for.
Read the full post at - Gospel of Thomas Edited by Stevan Davies I picked up the Gospel of Thomas recently while working through Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I hadn't read the Gospel of Thomas in a very long time, and MacCulloch's treatment of the early church controversies reminded me just how much insight this text provides.
Read the full post at - India: A Cultural Journey by Putumayo India: A Cultural Journey is a coffee table reference book — large-scale photography paired with written context at the opening of each chapter. It's not a history. It's not a travel guide. It's more of a visual immersion into what India looks and feels like culturally.
Read the full post at - Electra by Sophocles Electra follows the family of Agamemnon after the Battle of Troy — specifically his daughter Electra, who is consumed by grief and rage over her father's murder and her desire for justice.
Read the full post at - 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez I picked this one up at the library with a pretty specific checklist in mind: I wanted a long novel, a Latin American novel, and something with a thread of magical realism running through it. I already love the way magical realism shows up in Haruki Murakami, and I've always had a soft spot for Southern Gothic — so a book that…
Read the full post at - James Baldwin on America I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. -James Baldwin
Read the full post at - Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson The Ministry for the Future is one of the better science fiction novels about climate change that I've read. It's fast-paced, well-written, and grounded in realistic scenarios. The setting works. The characters work. The whole thing works.
Read the full post at - The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo The Redeemer is not Nesbø at his absolute best, but "not his best" for Nesbø still means it's a very good book. The plot pulls Harry Hole into the world of the Salvation Army, a contract killing, and a web of secrets that gets darker the further in you go.
Read the full post at - Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber If you've read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen Listen So Kids Will Talk (also by Faber), you already know the format: real-world scenarios, illustrated examples, and a very practical, non-preachy tone. Siblings Without Rivalry follows the same approach and lands just as well.
Read the full post at - Soul Boom by Rainn Wilson I stumbled across Rainn Wilson's podcast Soul Boom the way I stumble across most things I didn't know I was interested in — serendipitously. One episode led to another, and after just a few episodes I had a decent sense of what he's been up to since The Office wrapped. The short version: he's been on a genuine, years-long mission to make big…
Read the full post at - Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson Back when I was a freshman in college, I picked up Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson (a pen name) while falling down a very specific rabbit hole — the world of 1980s South Florida hustle-culture business people. Mail order, media, direct response marketing. Not exactly the role models section of a business school syllabus. But it's…
Read the full post at - Click by Ori Baufmann Click by Ori and Rom Brafman is a fun, fast little pop science book about why some relationships just...click. Why do some people go from strangers to fast friends in an afternoon while others stay awkward acquaintances for years?
Read the full post at - Notes On The Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa I pulled Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa off a library shelf somewhat serendipitously after reading...