Everyone Is Welcome to My Mountains
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I discuss what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. This...
Notable Sandwiches July 4th Special: Barbecue
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, led gently by my brilliant and long-suffering editor David Swanson, wade through the rough waters of...
Writing into the Wreck
I, for one, never asked to live in a collapsing empire. The feeling of what you thought to be solid ground turning to a shower of scree under your feet, the...
Notable Sandwiches #129: Pan Bagnat
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the movable-feast where my editor David Swanson and I pull up a chair at the strange table that is Wikipedia’s List of...
How to Survive Midsummer in New York
Tuesday, the greatest city in the world experienced one of its hottest days, and one of its coolest nights. By midday, temperatures in New York topped 100...
June Culture Chat
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I discuss what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. BECOME...
Notable Sandwiches #128: The Princess and the Pambazo
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the movable-feast where my editor David Swanson and I pull up a chair at the strange table that is Wikipedia’s List of...
Identity Sprain
Trump’s birthday parade In her masterpiece Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, the Nobel-Prize winning author and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich...
A Sunflower with Her Face in the Middle
Sometimes your world shrinks wildly: to the precise diameter of your mom’s aortic valve, for example, or the too-minute value that shows up on the pulse...
Notable Sandwich Special: Literary Heroes
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, where my editor David Swanson and I pull up a chair at the strange table that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches...
You Are What You Eat
Casey Means, Influencer General Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America....
Notable Sandwiches #127: Open-Faced
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the movable-feast feature where my editor David Swanson and I pull up a chair at the strange table that is Wikipedia’s...
On A.I.'s Artificial Incompetence
To even the most casual reader, a newspaper’s annual publishing schedule can be numbingly familiar, from the “look at the year ahead” in January, to the...
May Culture Chat
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I discuss what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. BECOME...
Notable Sandwiches #126: Num Pang
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, your host, along with my editor David, lay out the multifarious and strange feast that is...
The Poisoning of the American Mind
The winds at Cape Denison on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, photographed by Frank Hurley, 1912 In the emptiness of Antarctica, on a desolate stretch...
Notable Sandwiches Special: 1909 Flashback Edition
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series in which I, alongside my editor David Swanson, stumble through the strange and ever-shifting document that is...
A Golden Age of Conclaves
By David Swanson “Das Konklave” by Hans Makart, 1864 The term conclave dates back to the 1268 papal election in Viterbo, Italy, which lasted so long that the...
So You Want to Learn About Polar Exploration
Welcome to our regular feature for paid subscribers! This is for you, the elite, to enjoy extra content, because you are kings, queens and gender-neutral...
Notable Sandwiches #125: Naan
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the moveable feast my stalwart editor David Swanson and I lay out for you every Friday, where we chronicle Wikipedia’s...