A FAVOR TO ASK: I don’t have a new My Favorite Things podcast this week (putting together next week’s!), but if you’ve been listening to the podcast and have a few minutes and would like to help me out, would you be able to write a quick review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify? I’m coming up on the one-year mark, and I’m hoping to start reaching out to interviewees outside of my immediate circle, and I think they’d be more apt to say yes if the show had a few dozen reviews.

As a person who jumps between writing, illustration, and video (and spends probably way too much time thinking about which is appropriate), this Substack piece, Maybe You Haven’t Found Your Creative Medium Yet, really hit home. Especially this pull quote: “Skill is what you can do, and your medium is where your ideas arrive whole. They are not always the same place. ”

I did not know I needed a 65-second video of a guy covering Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” using a ruler, a chair, a comb, a calculator, a kazoo, a piece of paper, a blown-up plastic bag, badminton rackets (I believe?), a whisk, a keyboard, and I think some sort of takeout container cup (?), but thankfully, it arrived in my life this past week.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to talk about some newer products from newsletter sponsor PATH Projects, so: This past couple months I have been loving their Sentinel Half Tight, despite not being much of a tights-wearer. BUT, since almost all my running shorts don’t have liners, I’ve been wearing the Sentinel Half Tights underneath because a) compression I am so excited about the pockets on the thighs, which hold my phone and several gels without any detectable movement. Also: If you click over to the PATH Projects website right now and sign up for their newsletter, you’ll get a gift card worth 20% of your first order’s value (sent after your purchase).

This is a really cool idea: A website cataloguing industry standards, “items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses.” I think it’s interesting even though I don’t work in any of these industries, but found plenty of items I own in the categories of Backpacking & Camping, Climbing & Rigging, Coffee & Cafes, and Construction & Carpentry. Oh, and Bike Shops. (via Kottke)

For whatever nefarious algorithmic reason, my feeds seem to be full of videos of fans catching baseballs in the stands of Major League Baseball games, and then handing those baseballs to kids, who are overjoyed, and I’ll tell you what, there are worse things to have populating your feed nowadays.

OK, so I’m not saying it was funny when Heath Ledger died, or when Nancy Sinatra died, or when Burt Reynolds died, or when anyone dies, but the fact this lady and her friend from college have kept their relationship going for 18 years solely with text messages announcing people have died? That’s funny.

Eater put out a list, with a map, of Chicago’s best deep dish pizzas, and I’m not saying I can vouch for the accuracy of the list, nor would I endorse anyone’s list, but I am saying that I have eaten at five of the 17 restaurants on this list and was not mad about any of them.

Books I’m Currently Reading:

• Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson

I missed the boat on Andrea Gibson’s poetry during their lifetime, only discovering them through the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light this year. When I told Hilary about the movie, she of course said, “Oh, I have one of their books in my office,” and grabbed Lord of the Butterflies for me. Which I am now reading at the rate of one or two poems per night, and loving it.

• Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives by Darby Saxbe PhD

My friend Sally recommended this brand-new book to us, and I of course was interested because of the big change in my life that has caused a thousand other little changes (including, presumably, how my brain works). I’m only one chapter into it so far but I am already impressed and grateful for Saxby’s engaging writing style.

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

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A few nights ago, I had my bicycle up on the stand in our garage, pulling the old chain through the derailleur, thinking about how I used to do bike maintenance in the bathtub (not while bathing). And that I’d had the same chain tool ever since those days, almost 19 years ago now.

I laid out the old chain on my workbench, next to the new chain. The guy at the bike shop had cut the new one for me a few hours earlier, with a few extra links. As I paid for it, he asked me, “You have a chain tool, right?” I said I did.

The bathtub bike maintenance phase feels like a long time ago now. I was in my late 20s, living in central Denver, in a small, carpeted apartment, with really no other space where I could work on a bicycle and not destroy the carpet. So I’d set the bike upside-down in the bathtub and sit on the edge of the tub with a few tools, and let the dirt and muck drop into the tub. I had no idea what I was doing at first, over-inflating tubes sometimes, having one pop after 10:00 p.m. one night, going off like a shotgun as I lay in bed reading, wondering what the hell just happened. I adjusted my bike’s 1989 brake calipers over and over again, grasping in ignorance, finally figuring out how to get them to actually stop my wheels from rolling when I squeezed the levers without rubbing the rims constantly on one side or the other.

I had asked my brother about which bike tools I should buy, reminding him that I didn’t have much money, and he said: Just buy a basic set of cheap tools, and if you break one, replace it with a nice one from Park Tools. So I got a basic set from Bike Nashbar, and they’ve moved with me to seven addresses, and I’m still using them. One of the clasps has broken off the tool case, and I lost the tire levers somewhere, and used all tube patches probably before Obama took office.

I got my first real road bike back in 2006, a gift from a dear friend, a used Trek 330 that was at that time 17 years old. To keep it rolling for my daily commutes and rides, I had to learn a lot: How to fix a flat, how to replace the pedals, and the wheels, and the brake pads, and the brake cables, and the chain, where to put grease and where to put lube, how to wrap bar tape, and most importantly, how to get around a city. I got a cable cutters, a chain whip, a master link pliers, multi-tools, a freewheel remover, a cone wrench, a pedal wrench, dozens of tubes and bottles of chain lube.

In the time that has passed since then, bikes have of course gotten way fancier, and my bikes have, well, not gotten much fancier.

I am somewhat aware of the technological advances incorporated into the best bicycles humans are making nowadays, like electronic shifting and electronic dropper posts and carbon this and that, and I know that if I wanted to spend $16,000 on a bicycle right now, I could do that. And that $16,000 bicycle—just like my much-less-fancy bicycle that goes bikepacking and on gravel rides and to the grocery store—transfers power from the rider to the rear wheel via a chain. And the chain on that $16,000 bike, which might cost a bit more than my chain, works pretty much exactly the same way my chain works.

If my phone breaks, I can’t fix it—I have to take it to a store and ask them to fix it (and they’d probably just make me buy a new one). Same thing with my computer, my iPad, a great many things on my car, my toaster oven, blender, the list goes on. But my just-fancy-enough-for-me bicycle? Sure, you might say it’s more convenient to just drop it off at a bike shop and have a bike mechanic work on it. But that takes a couple days, if it’s just something uncomplicated like adjusting the brakes, or putting on new brake pads, or swapping out some tires, or a new chain. And of course I have to leave it there for a few days so they can work on it, that convenience starts to feel quite inconvenient.

Maybe it’s a little curmudgeonly, my version of Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer” (RIP). But can I be allowed this one analog thing to hold fast to, that is without even the faintest trace of Big Tech in its DNA, that never prompts me for a system update, that I can fix myself and keep alive as long as I want to, because maybe that keeps me human?

Besides, I’m not getting rid of this fucking chain tool. We’ve been through too much together.

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(The title of this piece is a nod to Owen Cutts, whose Instagram you should definitely check out)

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[NOTE: This is a post I created for Patreon supporters, so I’m publishing it here for paid Substack subscribers as well]

The first time I had a copyright issue, my website wasn’t even three years old, and barely generating any income, let alone enough to hire an intellectual property lawyer.

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I’ve read dozens of tributes to Dolly Parton since she died this week, and the one Hanif Abdurraqib wrote on Instagram is one of my favorites (no surprise).

Speaking of Dolly Parton, in a tribute that required much more physical effort (I assume), Jeff Garmire decided to run 9 5Ks (“9 to 5”) and made a short video, incorporating some bits of Dolly’s biography (this is also one of my favorite tributes I’ve seen).

I long believed that coffee was an extremely powerful diuretic, and that my excessive coffee drinking meant I was sort of chronically dehydrated. Many, many years ago, I suggested to my then co-worker (and still dear friend) Mitsu that he should maybe consider drinking water instead of just coffee all the time and he deadpanned, “There’s water in coffee.” He was not wrong, and I wasn’t 100 percent incorrect, but a better answer is in this article by newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration founder Andy Blow: Does coffee ACTUALLY dehydrate you and harm performance? [<—This link will also give you 15 percent off your first 2026 purchase of PFH products]

My Annual Performance, As Reviewed By My Dog: “Erica excels in creating a positive team-building environment through a combination of belly scratches, gazing into my eyes, and reaffirming my position as the ‘best doggie in the whole wide world.’”

YouTube fed me this 25-minute set of chill electronic music by Jai Cuzco and I can’t stop looping it (and every once in a while clicking back to enjoy the view out his window).

This is not cerebral at all, but I think will make you smile: This guy futzing with the fuel door on a car at the gas station, and then the guy and his friend futzing with it, and then their other friend tries to help, and then they realize they’re being filmed by the folks in the car behind them, and, well, it’s worth a watch (with the sound on).

I got to talk to writer, podcaster, and former wildland firefighter Amanda Monthei last week for the My Favorite Things podcast, and had a blast—her list had some classics like Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, newer writing from John Jeremiah Sullivan, and a 2005 ski movie.

Lastly: I collaborated with the Outdoor Alliance to make the below series of illustrations about the USDA proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule. If you’d like to comment, here’s a link to a form on the Outdoor Alliance website where you can customize your message. A note: Apparently the USDA only has to consider “substantive comments,” and the folks at ON-X have explained how to do that here.

Those links, again:

• Form on the Outdoor Alliance website where you can customize your public comment about the Roadless Rule

• How to write a comment that qualifies as a “substantive comment”

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Books I’m Currently Reading:

• Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives by Darby Saxbe PhD

My friend Sally recommended this brand-new book to us, and I of course was interested because of the big change in my life that has caused a thousand other little changes (including, presumably, how my brain works). I’m only one chapter into it so far but I am already impressed and grateful for Saxby’s engaging writing style.

• How to Wash the Dishes by Peter Miller

I picked up this meditative book on, you guessed it, how to wash dishes, at our local bookstore, noting that the “Staff Picks” card inside it was from the owner, Garth, with the simple note “this should settle some arguments.” I’m only about halfway through it, and we don’t have any arguments about dishwashing at our house, but I’m enjoying it so far.

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

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Amanda’s favorite things are:

1. Booter Crunk by Rage Films

2. The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway

3. The writing of John Jeremiah Sullivan (specifically “Upon This Rock” and “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie”

4. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

5. King Gizzard live on KEXP (specifically the song “Billabong Valley”

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I can’t believe I just discovered that Randall Munroe of XKCD fame has been making these “What If?” videos for two years now, but this one, “What if you dropped a bowling ball in the Mariana Trench?” was incredibly entertaining and interesting for its sub-3-minute runtime. (video)

Boy do I have some nostalgia for the Columbia House CD catalogs of the 1990s—and a funny story about a collection agency that is way too long for the Friday version of this newsletter, but maybe I’ll write it up some Thursday. But if you knew about Columbia House, and you didn’t know the company was still around, well, it’s finally shutting down next month. (via Kottke)

I’m not saying I had anything to do with this essay being hilarious and absolutely spot-on with some of my own experiences trying to get my kid to sleep in his own bed over the past couple years, but Jeanette did attend this year’s Running to Stand Still writing workshop, during which we all encouraged her to write more, which she did, and after reading her piece, “We Ride at Dawn,” I think you might encourage her to do the same.

This past Tuesday, I finished reading The Size of Your Joy, Elise Powers’ book of poems that I’ve had in this newsletter for a while, and in the final pages of the book I (finally!) found the poem that led me to buy the book a couple months ago: Small Inconveniences, which you can read on her Substack.

This is not a long article, but I appreciated the concept, “A brief consideration of some fictional big boys,” inspired by the newest season of Reacher, and this bit: “While Reacher may be our current moment’s most beloved answer to the question ‘What if a guy was really big?’ he is by no means the only one. Plenty of authors have explored the possibilities inherent in hugeness.” [GIFT LINK]

I just found out about this website, Beautiful Public Data, and was delighted by this presentation of more than 50,000 boat names culled from NOAA vessel traffic data, and the ability to browse by category (puns!).

Books I’m Currently Reading:

• Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives by Darby Saxbe PhD

My friend Sally recommended this brand-new book to us, and I of course was interested because of the big change in my life that has caused a thousand other little changes (including, presumably, how my brain works). I’m only one chapter into it so far but I am already impressed and grateful for Saxby’s engaging writing style.

• How to Wash the Dishes by Peter Miller

I picked up this meditative book on, you guessed it, how to wash dishes, at our local bookstore, noting that the “Staff Picks” card inside it was from the owner, Garth, with the simple note “this should settle some arguments.” I’m only about halfway through it, and we don’t have any arguments about dishwashing at our house, but I’m enjoying it so far.

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

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Some images of the aforementioned “Did You Have A Good Adventure?” poster and magnet:

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I ran 300 laps on the indoor track at the gym in our neighborhood, each one one-tenth of a mile, clockwise. This was a couple Fridays ago, when the air quality index was 110, which is technically “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” according to the EPA.

At least I think it was 300 laps. It was probably more, because I ran until my watch hit 30.06 miles, and the gym says the track is 0.1 mile per lap, but my watch often recorded something a little short of 0.1 mile per lap, and I wasn’t going to try to keep count of my laps for five hours.

The wildfire smoke moved into town the last week of July, and more or less stuck around for two and a half weeks. I made a rule that I wouldn’t run outdoors if the AQI was over 100, which some people might say is a bit over-cautious. But the truth is, nobody knows the long-term effects of wildfire smoke exposure. I was talking to a friend about this personal rule, and they said, “Does it bother your lungs when it’s over 100?” And I thought No, but I smoked hundreds of packs of cigarettes when I was a young/dumb person, and I wouldn’t say that bothered my lungs at the time, but we all know how that turns out. When the AQI went over 150, we decided to start driving Jay to school instead of having him ride his bike.

This is not what I love about running, I kept telling myself as I went around and around. Or is it? At the very least, I am not sitting in front of a laptop, or scrolling through my phone, watching videos of Other People Living Life. I am here, Living Life, around and around and around.

The week before my 300 laps, I ran 25 miles in the gym, but counter-clockwise, so left turns all day. I broke it up with a couple short runs on the treadmills, where the more sane people run indoors. Or are they more sane? I had a lot of time to think about this, circling the Human-Powered Travel Simulation Machines, the treadmills, the stair climbers, the stationary bicycles, the rowing machines.

My dad used to love this old Rodney Dangerfield joke that went something like this: “I told my dad I was tired of my life going around in circles. So he nailed my other foot to the floor.” I wish my dad could see me now. I mean, I guess he could see me now. I could FaceTime him.

I choose to run on the 0.1-mile track because it’s cooler than the treadmills. Or at least I sweat less when I run on the track. The treadmills, at least the ones I have run on at the gym, have this tiny vent, about an inch by five inches, that allegedly contains a fan. I have turned on the fan before, all the way up to the highest setting, which produces a breeze equivalent to a six-week-old baby breathing on you. Which does nothing to mitigate the drops of sweat that drip off my body in strange trajectories, onto the treadmill belt, the rails, the buttons, and hopefully not onto the person running on the adjacent treadmill? So I run on the track instead, where my actual forward motion through the air helps mitigate this.

I tell myself that people run marathons inside the San Quentin prison. I tell myself that I’m lucky that this is an exception for me, that as a white male in a small U.S. city, I feel safe enough to run outdoors almost all the time, including in the dark, and that’s a privilege. A guy ran an ultramarathon around a single roundabout. People run the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100-mile race over 52 days around a single city block in Queens every year.

I tell Hilary this is madness. I’m not complaining, more so just thinking out loud, like this is madness, right? Half asking her to be the voice of reason and say, Yes, it’s insane, stop doing it and find a different hobby, either permanently or temporarily, or—and this might sound strange, but you could, hear me out—develop a more normal relationship with exercise.

But she is not the voice of reason this time, and instead says, “It’s probably good training for your race.” And she is probably right. But it also occurs to me that when two people are partnered for a long time, their co-thinking can evolve into a somewhat altered shared reality, and maybe I shouldn’t always assume, “Well, if I run it by my wife and she doesn’t think it sounds crazy, then it must not be crazy.”

The race I signed up for is 24 hours of loops around a 1.68-mile crushed gravel path, almost completely flat (9 feet of elevation gain per loop). It sounds awful for many reasons: It’s repetitive, it’s flat, it’s probably going to be hot, there’s no shade, and it’s not particularly scenic. But it’s interesting—or maybe I’m telling myself this to rationalize it—because I will have an opportunity to quit every 1.68 miles, every time I loop past the EZ-up with a cooler, a camp chair, and my stuff in it. I cannot run faster to make it end sooner. It’s going to be boring, or, through another lens, you might say it’s going to be meditative.

I have told myself that if the AQI was higher than 80 on the weekend of the race, I will stay home. Most days, 90 percent of me is rooting for good air quality on the day of the race. Some days, though, the part of me that doesn’t know how I’ll react to running 1.68-mile loops for an entire day (and is maybe a little afraid of the whole thing), wouldn’t mind not having to test myself.

The week after my 300-lap run, I run 25 miles on the indoor track at the gym. The track is shaped like this:

The straightaways take me 54 steps to cover, and the curves take me 26 steps to cover. I have been trying to slow down for the curves to keep my body upright in hopes of avoiding some weird injury from making 1000+ turns with the same leg on the inside of the curve. I am not sure it helps.

After two weeks of running only indoors, only at the gym, I am starting to see many of the same people, and recognize their outfits. They work out, I run past them 10, 15, 30 times as I keep doing the same loop, and they move from one resistance training machine to another, finally disappearing at the end of their completely reasonable workout, and I keep circling the track.

I try to imagine the reasons all these other people have, why they’re spending their hour or hours at the gym—maybe to get stronger, maybe to feel better, to look more fit, to stay mobile, to fend off aging, to improve just a little bit in some way—they all seem valid, sensible even. Maybe that’s something worth exploring: Sensibility. I’ll look into that. After a few more laps.

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I thought this was going to be one of those “look how badly humans behave on airplanes” videos, which I guess it kind of is at the beginning, but how this musician ended up using it had me laughing and clapping at the end.

PATH Projects is sponsoring this week’s newsletter, and I’ve been running in a couple items from them that I’ll be mentioning in future newsletters, but this week I thought I would mention the shorts that I’ve been wearing the longest: the Sykes PX, which I wear because a) they’re comfortable b) they’re durable and c) they have three external pockets in the back, the middle of which is big enough to hold a phone. And they’re available in 5” and 7” inseams. I am not sure how many miles I’ve put on the six pairs I own, but I know I bought the first pair in early 2024 and haven’t worn them out yet. They’re on sale now at the PATH site (along with a bunch other apparel), and you can check them out with this link.

Thanks to Marty Brodsky, whose writing I have mentioned many times in this newsletter, I melted away 20 minutes poking around this website, Read The Places, an open atlas of literature, which maps locations of novels, and allows you to add map locations in novels. (I had a blast poking around the map of all the locations that have been added so far)

I have just discovered The Ocho subreddit, and have scrolled through several videos of activities I had no ideas were sports, and I don’t know that this game/sport actually has a name (somebody let me know if it does?) but wow does it look strenuous.

This essay about someone using AI to read The Last of the Mohicans, and I wouldn’t say I care much about someone using AI to read a book, but I really enjoyed the writer Albert Burneko’s very salty explanation of What Reading Is And Why We Do It, which contained sentences like these: ‘When you read a book, the stuff in the book goes into your mind, and your mind assembles all of the stuff into imagery and thoughts and feelings, and alchemizes meaning from it. A person reasonably could consider this “what’s good about reading,” or “the point of reading,” or “buddy that’s actually just ... what reading is,” but that all assumes that your reason for reading anything is that you want to learn something from it, even if it’s only at the level of, like, what ultimately happens to the Whos down in Whoville.’ [GIFT LINK]

I met Derik Penny when he was working behind the counter at the Denver Bicycle Cafe in 2013 or 2014, and we have stayed in touch through the years thanks to a mutual love of baseball, art, and making things out of wood (something he is 3 to 4,000 times better at than I am). We were messaging about something a few weeks back when I thought, “I bet Derik would be a great guest to have on My Favorite Things,” and I am happy to say I was not wrong. We talked about Jeff Lemire’s trilogy of Essex County graphic novels, BadBadNotGood’s album Sour Soul, the YouTube channel Ishitani Furniture, and Andrew Forbes’ book of baseball essays The Utility of Boredom, and you can listen to it here.

I am pretty sure I still have the glasses I wore to watch the 2017 solar eclipse, and I now want to go digging for them after seeing this collection of eclipse glasses from 1793-2019.

Speaking of that eclipse, I was chatting with a friend about the most recent eclipse and remembered I had shot a short video of the one in 2017, when Hilary and I drove to western Nebraska to check it out. I turned the camera on us instead of the sun, so you can watch the fields behind us go completely dark and then light back up again in about 3.5 minutes. (I re-uploaded it yesterday)

Books I’m Currently Reading:

• How to Wash the Dishes by Peter Miller

I picked up this meditative book on, you guessed it, how to wash dishes, at our local bookstore, noting that the “Staff Picks” card inside it was from the owner, Garth, with the simple note “this should settle some arguments.” I’m only a third of the way through it, and we don’t have any arguments about dishwashing at our house, but I’m enjoying it so far.

• The Size of Your Joy by Elise M. Powers

Totally forgot how I found out about this book of poetry or when I ordered it, but it showed up in the mail a few weeks ago. I had been enjoying reading a few poems every night when I finally read the back cover out loud to Hilary: “For every woman who’s ever held joy and sorrow in the same breath—this debut is a tender, powerful reminder that you are not alone.” So I guess I’m not the primary target market—but I’m still loving the book!

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

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Derik’s favorite things are:

1. Coffee

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

3. Essex County trilogy by Jeff Lemire

4. Sour Soul by BadBadNotGood

5. Ishitani furniture (by way of George and Mira Nakashima)

6. The Utility of Boredom by Andrew Forbes

other things we mentioned:

• The Hustler

• Denver’s Esquire Theater (RIP)

• Denny’s

• 10,000 Ink Stains by Jeff Lemire

• Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

• Oddissee

• George Nakashima

• The Only Way is the Steady Way by Andrew Forbes

• The Billy Ripken error card

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Please permit me a proud husband moment here: After growing and birthing an entire human in 2022, Hilary bravely dove into the first months of postpartum, with a new baby to take care of, and a new identity: Mom. As she struggled to keep her head above water, she wished for something to help her transition into motherhood, and also to help her hang on to who she was in addition to being a mom. So she started taking notes, creating the first sketches of the book she would have loved to have. Now our little guy is four years old, and Hilary’s book is finally finished. It’s a guided journal for new moms called How to Stay You When Your Name Becomes Mom, and it’s available in paperback and as an email subscription—75 short prompts delivered daily to your inbox. Both options and more info are here, and Hilary’s newsletter essay about the making of it is here.

Over the past summer, I have noticed how much better cold drinks taste after I exercise (this often happens when I am standing in front of a beverage cooler at a grocery store or convenience store). I’ve never questioned why this was—or if cold beverages would actually help me perform better. But, Andy Blow, founder of newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration did, and wrote a great piece about it: Does drinking cold drinks in hot weather improve performance? [<--- this link will give you 15% off of your first 2026 purchase of PFH stuff—as far as beverages go, I recommend the PH 1000 drink mix]

Solid modern art social media joke right here.

I used to sit through newspaper editorial meetings, during which we’d all go through our ideas for stories, so I like to imagine the meetings that must go on at The Ringer, in which someone must have said, “Hey, the 20th anniversary of Talladega Nights is coming up—I think we should do an oral history of Will Ferrell’s sports movies.” And someone else says, “Great idea, get on it.”

Boy do I love it when we find crazy stuff that changes our idea of history, like this, ahem, “sprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expected” in the Amazon rainforest, maybe up to 3 million people. (via Kottke)

Thanks to next week’s My Favorite Things podcast guest, I now know that Cillian Murphy (yes, Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy) had a BBC radio show in 2020, 2021, and 2023, in which he shared some of his favorite music. Thanks to my research, that podcast guest now knows that the episodes are available on the Cillian Music Archive Project, which is not only doing a service by providing access to these episodes, but is also one of the most amazing websites I’ve seen in a long time.

I am not necessarily a Knicks fan, and I don’t of course live in New York, but all the same, I loved this 3-minute video + poem about how it felt for the city when the Knicks won the NBA championship.

Last week I got to catch up with my friend Ian McLeod, who has composed music for a bunch of my films since 2016, and has of course made music for much, much bigger clients. I had him on the My Favorite Things podcast so we could talk about Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Midnight Marauders, Tinker Hatfield’s sneaker designs, Songs In The Key of Life, and Keith Haring’s paintings—which led off with a fantastic story of a less-than-humble teenage Ian getting humbled at a jazz jam in Washington DC, and using it as fuel to become a better musician.

Books I’m Currently Reading:

• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Raden Keefe

I forget who recommended this, but I’ve been listening to this one as I crank out endless laps on an indoor track as the AQI hasn’t been below 100 for a couple weeks now here in Missoula. The laps are boring but compared to the hunger strikes IRA members did in prison in the 1970s, the indoor track is quite pleasant.

• Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman

A friend recommended this (last summer I think?) and it’s ostensibly about people who are working toward solutions to adapt to climate change, and there is quite a bit of hope, but of course to tell those stories you have to tell the stories of what’s happening right now, which can feel a bit grim some days.

• The Size of Your Joy by Elise M. Powers

Totally forgot how I found out about this book of poetry or when I ordered it, but it showed up in the mail a few weeks ago. I had been enjoying reading a few poems every night when I finally read the back cover out loud to Hilary: “For every woman who’s ever held joy and sorrow in the same breath—this debut is a tender, powerful reminder that you are not alone.” So I guess I’m not the primary target market—but I’m still loving the book!

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

AND SPEAKING OF BOOKS:

I have finally re-stocked signed copies of all the books I sell in my DFTBA shop, so they’re all available again:

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An unlikely, but possible scenario you might find yourself in this upcoming weekend: You’re at a barbecue or other gathering, chatting with someone you just met, and you’ve covered the basics (your job, family, where you live, et cetera) and there’s a pause in conversation. You need to think of something to say, or it’s going to get awkward quickly. So you say, “Did you know there’s this town in Newfoundland and Labrador that’s had these 110 vats of fish sauce that have been rotting in a defunct factory since 2001, and the smell has grown so bad that some people move out of town for the summer, but they’re finally starting to clean it up?” When the person you’re talking to says, “Really?” you will of course need more information, and thanks to this Defector article, you will be prepared: Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town

This new double-feature episode of the Dirtbag Diaries includes my friend Mike Foote, who sent me a version of his story about his dad and herons just before the submission deadline, and I loved it, and assumed Fitz and Becca at the Dirtbag Diaries would love it too. And the second part is Natasha Buffo, who brought an early version of her story about the pondering whether or not to have a child to our 2023 Freeflow Institute writing workshop (when things were quite a bit different for her). I was psyched to see them together and thought it made for a great episode.

This article about men needing better fitness role models captured a feeling I think a lot of us might have about “manosphere”-influenced wellness advice, and I found myself nodding when the author stopped looking at influencers and went looking for people he respected to see how they approached staying fit and healthy: “In aiming for a vision of fitness that avoids overemphasis on masculinity, I gravitated away from influencers and biohackers toward strong artists who had prioritized physical strength in their daily routines.” [GIFT LINK] (thanks, Ben)

I’ve been following Denver artist and muralist Thomas Evans for years now, and I remember when he announced the baggage sculpture he’d installed at Denver International Airport (there’s a photo of it on the homepage of his website here). I loved this video he shared on social media this week of the process of cleaning the sculpture after 18 months.

I almost put this video at the top of this newsletter, but I thought the bike obstacle course was a bit more interesting: Best moments of the Red Bull Dance Your Style Qualifiers in the U.S. (The first guy, who is amazing, comes back at the end of the video). (And yes, I know, that’s two Red Bull videos in one newsletter)

This poem is only 20 words long, but I’ve been thinking about it for like two weeks now.

I wrote a piece this week for paid Substack subscribers about not taking shortcuts—or, I guess, intentionally taking the more labor-intensive route, while not at all being confident it makes a difference in the final product. (Next week I’ll have another bonus episode of My Favorite Things in which I talk about another one of my favorite creative works, which is a simple but genius XY chart)

And finally, the books I’m currently reading:

• Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman

• The Size of Your Joy by Elise M. Powers

• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

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• Stevie Wonder — Innervisions

• Stevie Wonder — Fulfillingness’ First Finale

• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Here’s two whole seconds of the latest video I put on YouTube, Why We Put In The Miles:

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Do you want to read an essay about a guy who was an editor at The Atlantic and quit his day job because he became obsessed with rebuilding stone walls in New England? Yes you do. [GIFT LINK]

I am a big fan of Craig Mod, and consider him a sort of an inspiration of how to think about making a living as an independent creative—i.e. write for the people who like your stuff, and figure out the most direct way to get it to them, even if it doesn’t match up with the traditional idea of “success” as a writer. So when I saw he was on the Design Matters podcast with Debbie Millman, I made the time to listen to it, and it delivered. Multiple times in the interview he mentions self-worth and how it influences so much of what we do, and it really hit home for me.

I have been running in PATH Projects gear for I think five years now, ever since my friend Josh gifted me one of their first hats (back in 2019?). I was happy to reconnect with PATH co-founder Floris Gierman a few weeks back and catch up, and we chatted about the possibility of them sponsoring this newsletter, and we talked about some of the pieces of their gear that are staples in my weekly running routine. Like the Wadi LS Hooded Tee 2.0, which I have put hundreds of running miles on over the past couple years (and quite a few hiking miles too). It’s lightweight, comes in five colors, and I’m not the biggest tech nerd out there, but I’ll tell you what: the single snap under the chin is genius, and keeps the hood over my head, where I want it when the sun is beating down (and also in the late fall and early spring when it’s a tiny bit cold). This link will take you to the PATH website to check them out.

We interviewed Adharanand Finn on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, and I’d read his book The Rise of the Ultrarunners years ago and loved it. But when I was researching what he’d been up to lately and found out he’d run a loop around Ireland over 68 days (1400+ miles!), I thought, “Dammit, that’s such a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” We got into that and more during our interview, and I am pleased to report that he seems like a great guy.

I love these kinds of articles that The Ringer puts together: Ranking the 15 Best (and Worst) Football Coaches in Movie History. Maybe because it’s just fun, maybe because I know these writers probably watched all of these movies as part of their research for this article, or maybe just because it feels light compared to the stream of stuff I get in my feeds every day. I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but I will say I heartily agree with Nos. 1 and 2 on this list.

File under “The Internet Makes Me Sad Sometimes, But Then Again, It Also Provides Stuff Like This”: This guy took an inner ear camera around his neighborhood and shot photos with it, and they’re delightfully … nostalgic?

I feel like I need more context for this video of this dad laughing his ass off when his daughter hands him a copy of her mugshot from her college years, but even without the story, this guy losing his shit for almost a minute straight made my day.

PS if you missed the 2-minute film I put on YouTube yesterday, here it is again:

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This is a sort of visual poem about running, but more about repetition, and believing in a thing that we do.

I’ve had the idea for this film for at least two and a half years, and when it finally came together over this past weekend, the finished product ended up being two minutes. Or 2:19, to be exact. It’s called “Why We Put In The Miles.” I hope you like it.

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P.S.: That design at the end of the video? At least three people have it tattooed on their bodies (to my knowledge), which is quite a commitment. But it’s also available on a T-shirt:

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This is a story about the minor-league Staten Island FerryHawks being the worst team in professional baseball this season, but the best part to me was Lauren Theisen’s description of what it was like to watch a night game in a stadium designed to hold 7,000+ people, but only had about 100 in attendance. Also, I have, probably like many New York City Marathon runners transferring from the early morning Staten Island Ferry to the buses to take us to the start line, glanced over at the stadium and its view of lower Manhattan across the water, and wondered what it was like to watch a game there. [GIFT LINK]

When it comes to surviving hot temperatures, the best strategy is probably to stop exercising outdoors so much. BUT, since I’m not gonna do that, I am interested in how to keep up my running and not have it wreck the rest of my day/week/life. So I was thrilled to find that newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration had senior sports scientist Dr. Lindsey Hunt write this piece, “What is the best cooling strategy for athletes?” [<—clicking this link will give you 15% off your first 2026 purchase of PFH products]

For our latest Trailhead podcast interview, we asked ultramarathon race photographer Anastasia Wilde to come on the show, because we wanted to hear what her job is like out there trying to capture moments during long, grueling races that take place on big swaths of land, on sections of trail that are not always easy to get to. (Plus I see Anastasia pretty much every time I’m at a local race—I could have easily walked over to her house to do the interview)

I don’t know how many other people will be excited about this beautifully presented Pudding story “What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?” made from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of menus from 1880 to 1920, but I loved scrolling through it (maybe best on a laptop/desktop computer). Also was pleasantly surprised to see the 1915 menu from the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs.

When I started writing for Adventure Journal in 2011, it was just a website (you might have even called it a “blog” in the early years). And then Stephen Casimiro launched the print edition of Adventure Journal ten years ago, and the stories in the print edition only lived in the pages of the print edition. Well, now those stories—all of them, from the print mag’s entire lifespan—are online on the new Adventure Journal website. BUT they’re only available to AJ subscribers, so I guess this is me recommending that you subscribe to Adventure Journal.

Leave it to the Swiss to put solar panels in an otherwise-unused space—between railroad tracks—and make it actually work. (via Kottke)

Reddit just decided that I needed to be aware of the r/DeathStairs subreddit yesterday, and have I ever been enjoying it. As stated, this set of folding stairs sitting above another flight of stairs, leading to a toilet (and I believe a shower!?!?) is a crossover with r/WeirdToilets, which is appropriate. But I have so many questions.

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Also: I just got a shipment of new Practice Maximum Enthusiasm pocket notebooks from Tobie at Mordecai Book Building. (They’re not for sale, but I send them out to Patreon supporters who join at the $5/month level or higher.)

• Nick’s essay about air saloons

• Goosebumps by R.L. Stine

• Captain Ron

• Tango & Cash

• The Blues Brothers

• Paterson

• Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

This New York Times article about Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger being a “good-bad movie” is fun and interesting, and it also made me think that if they really want to milk this “good-bad” thing, they could probably just write about every 80s and 90s action movie that I loved/love (aside from Die Hard, which is just a good-good movie). [GIFT LINK] (thanks, Syd)

I don’t know why I am interested in the $1.50 Costco hot dog (I’ve been vegetarian for 20+ years now, so I’ve never actually eaten one). But I am interested in the $1.50 Costco hot dog, mostly because people love it, its $1.50 price seems to be part of the Costco mythology, and people like Alan Seigel see fit to write about said mythology and what it means today.

I got to interview author and journalist Heather Hansman on My Favorite Things last week, and we mostly talked about her favorite things, including The Fugees’ The Score, Alex Katz’s Maine paintings, Raven’s Exile by Ellen Meloy, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White (writing nerds unite!), and Lisa Grossman’s river paintings, but I also can confirm her new book that comes out next week, Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild, is a wonderful read.

There’s a section of this piece that captures something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: The idea that we all feel like we should try to make more money in order to afford nicer things and experiences, but that at a certain amount of wealth, you often (maybe unintentionally) buy yourself out of having an authentic human experience—or at least, an experience that’s authentic to most humans. Anyway, Garrett Bucks wrote it way better in his essay, “Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun?”: “I resent the corporations that commodify our joy. I hate this broader system of haves and have nots. And I’ve got plenty of not-too-tender feelings about the wealth hoarders themselves, occupying their luxury boxes and driving up prices for the rest of us. But I also feel sorry for them, because the more they buy into the idea of exclusivity and isolation, the more that they’ll never actually experience the best parts of being alive.”(via Kottke)

My friend Nick Triolo’s fantastic (and award-winning!) book The Way Around just celebrated its first birthday this week, and he found a really unique way to write about the experience of creating the book, and doing his best to push it out into the world for the past year, including his therapist’s line that “by publishing a book you’re voluntarily expanding the surface area of the self that makes contact with the world, and that’ll bring with it all sorts of interesting and challenging encounters.”

In a much more less cerebral recommendation, here is a video shot by a couple watching a guy’s fully-loaded shopping cart roll away from him all the way across a Walmart parking lot while they laugh their asses off, which I believe will also make you laugh your ass off.

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