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I’m writing this on Thursday afternoon, and by the time you read it, the Chicago White Sox may have broken the record for most games ever lost in a Major League Baseball season. I’ve been a little interested in this for a few weeks now, not out of schadenfreude, but because people are writing about “losing” in really thoughtful ways, like in this piece. (gift link)
I don’t know if this is inspiring, but it’s really interesting if you are a little bit of a geography nerd: Mount Rainier’s highest point isn’t the highest point anymore, according to new GPS evidence.
I follow the Photoshop Request subreddit, and it seems to be mostly people earnestly asking for help: Please remove this person from the background of the last photo we have of my dad, so we can use it at his funeral, Please edit this photo of me so I can use it for a LinkedIn profile photo, stuff like that. But every once in a while, someone asks for something like this, and I really appreciate the title for this particular one: Please put my son in a terribly dangerous situation
The Pudding put together a web page of every one of the 59,705 outdoor basketball court in the United States, and I’m not saying you’re going to spend an hour on this, but if you spend a few minutes on it, you can at least marvel a little bit at how big of a deal it is.
I’m sure every parent has warned a child about sticking things up their nose, and I don’t know if this is a worst-case scenario or a best-case scenario, but here’s the headline: “LEGO piece found in 32-year-old’s nose after decades”
I love Seth Werkheiser’s whole approach to telling us we can make art instead of making stuff for social media, but this newest story on his Social Media Escape Club Substack really hits home—it’s about his dad, and his dad’s music, and a neighbor who maybe wouldn’t have called himself a “fan,” but … anyway, it’s worth your time.
We are almost 75 percent through 2024, and it reminds me that I should mention this: If you’re on Strava and you like to go uphill, I created a club called 100 Grand. I made it in 2023 to give people a fun incentive that wasn’t based on how fast you can go or how many miles you cover—basically, if you climb 100,000 vertical feet this year, I’ll send you a sticker at the end of 2024 (and if you climb 300,000 vertical feet, you get 3 stickers, and so on). There’s no sponsor or anything, I just thought it would be fun. Anyway, we all have about three months left to clock some more vert.
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Writer, artist, filmmaker, columnist for Outside Magazine. My newsletter about creativity, adventure, and enthusiasm goes out to 15,000+ subscribers every week.
Friday Inspiration 544 Clips of this performance were floating around social media this week, especially noting that Robert Glasper has tears running down under his sunglasses while he plays a cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” and it is incredibly powerful. But I poked around a bit and he’s been covering this song for at least 20 years, so I wonder why this performance affected him so much? (video) This New York Times article about Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger being a...
Life Stage: Big Tent Sometime between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. last Wednesday night, I got kicked in the head. I jolted awake, not sure what was happening for a few seconds, then realized it was my 3-foot 6-inch tall preschooler’s feet in my face. I was trying to sleep against the wall of the biggest tent I’ve ever owned, and finding it a little cramped because my child, who was sleeping between myself and my wife, had worked himself into a position exactly perpendicular to us: I gently turned him...
Friday Inspiration 543 I don’t know how the algorithm served this guy’s videos to me, but they’re almost all about 60 seconds long and it’s extremely refreshing to watch something aesthetic and contemplative, compared to all the 60-second social videos that I usually see. (video) Boy did I get sucked into this story in which a guy living in a pretty nice neighborhood notices a woman living in her car across the street and decides to go talk to her and see how she’s doing. It keeps getting...