Friday Inspiration 513 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...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Friday Inspiration 512 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!). -- If you haven’t seen One Battle After Another yet, this has...
14 days ago • 3 min read
I Forgot To Stop Writing Bad Poems (For Several Years) About three years ago, I decided to start writing bad poetry on a fitness app I use regularly. When I checked last week, I had written more than 500 poems. Mildly curious about whether any of them were halfway decent, I gave them a quick read. And then … … did someone offer me a significant sum of money to publish some of my running poetry in a chapbook? No. OK, but was I pleasantly surprised to discover that I had, through persistence...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Friday Inspiration 511 NOTE: I will not be sending out a Black Friday email about all the merch in my DFTBA store, but I put a bunch of images and links to mugs, t-shirts, posters, and signed books at the end of this email (including some new stuff!), so scroll to the end if you're starting to do some holiday shopping. -- Sometimes this space gets filled by a video of a person skiing some insanely dangerous line in the mountains or a person taking on some other difficult challenge in nature,...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Friday Inspiration 510 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...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Trip Report: Attempting The Express Tour Du Mont Blanc (click here to watch the video on YouTube) We were scarcely eight miles into the 105-mile Tour du Mont Blanc when I narrowly avoided disaster. I had trained all summer for the steep ultramarathon days we planned to put in on the TMB. I came to Chamonix with 20-plus years of experience in the mountains, which I’d like to think amounted to at least something like wisdom. I have calibrated and recalibrated my risk tolerance as I’ve gotten...
29 days ago • 14 min read
Friday Inspiration 509 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,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Friday Inspiration 508 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...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
When You Can Walk Anywhere You Want I don't often re-publish stories I've written, but I remembered this one this past week when I was tagging along on a rock climbing trip in the desert with my mom and her friends. I think this essay, back when I wrote it in 2013, was a sort of expression of gratitude through a story about my grandma (my mom's mom), who was in the last 14 months of her life at the time I published it. I hope it still resonates. -- I flew to Iowa to visit my grandmother in...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
