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​Friday Inspiration 526​
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My friend Ed, whose excellent Mountain & Prairie podcast you’re probably aware of if you’ve been following this newsletter for more than a few weeks, and who is also tapped into some Red Hot Chili Peppers content pipeline probably because of our shared love of Flea’s memoir, Acid for the Children, sent me this video this week, and it was a breath of fresh air. (video)

If you missed yesterday’s post about screen time, I wrote a piece about getting some time back from my phone, using a very simple idea/metric, and how it’s been going.

This is super-interesting but also extremely technical: A story about calculating the longest line of sight possible on Earth. As the author states at the end of the piece, visiting the actual spot to confirm the calculation would involve some significant mountaineering—but also at the end, in the footnotes, he says that the inspiration for the idea came from a 2012 forum thread on SummitPost, which warmed my crusty old mountaineering heart. (via Kottke)

I love the Poem of the Day emails, but I love them even more when they give me a poem I can read in less than 60 seconds and then think about for days afterward, like this one, which stuck the line “when you’re broke, everything you touch is artificial” in my head, where it will live for a long time.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has come up a bunch of times in conversations I’ve had in the past few weeks (including podcast interviews with Brad Stulberg on The Trailhead and the episode with my friend Kurt Wikel on My Favorite Things), so when I saw this piece by Ted Gioia, “The Real Story Behind 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’” I of course read the whole thing and learned a lot of the backstory of a book I read/loved when I was 21.

Michelle J’s newsletter isn’t huge, but I read it every time I see a new post pop up. I have technically made a living as an adventure writer, and when I teach writing, that’s kind of where I come from, but I really want to teach people how to do what she does, which is make funny, thoughtful stories out of normal things like, well, this one, The Hidden Power Dynamics of the Office Potluck.​

I saw some photos of Kyoto University’s graduation ceremony on a Reddit post saying it was “an art school graduation” in which the school lets students wear whatever they want, but as far as my research has found (someone please correct me if I’m wrong), it’s just the university’s graduation ceremony. Anyway, this article is the most detailed piece I found on it,the costumes are fantastic and I think more higher learning institutions should adopt this idea.

I linked to this article on the Precision Fuel & Hydration website a few months ago, “How to start strength training for endurance,” and I am not trying to be an evangelist, but would like to say that I have been doing the exact two workouts mentioned in that article during my two gym sessions per week since Thanksgiving, and I can’t believe I didn’t start doing it sooner. (Also, if you click that link to read the article, you’ll get 15% off your first purchase of PFH stuff from the website, including this package of my favorite PFH fuel)

I have probably spent 1000 times as many minutes reading about AI than I have using actual AI tools, but it’s always refreshing to read something calm and thoughtful about this whole *gestures at everything* era we seem to be in now. There were a bunch of bangers in this essay by Charles Yu (which was apparently adapted from a lecture he gave at Davidson College), including this paragraph: “But the achievement of a degree does not cover, does not even purport to touch, emotional intelligence. What is a Ph.D. in reading the room? In teaching your kid to ride a bike? In crying because you were moved by a piece of music? We consider elephants intelligent because they mourn their dead. What is a Ph.D. in grief, awe, wonder, curiosity?” [GIFT LINK]

We announced this on social media last week: An alumnus of my Running to Stand Still writing + trail running workshop has offered to provide a full-ride scholarship to this year’s workshop (June 7-12, Homestake Pass, Montana). The deadline is March 28, 2026, and the details and application are here.​

And if you’re wondering what it’s like to attend the workshop, this video I made with my friend and Freeflow Institute founder Chandra Brown should give you an idea of our general vibe: