1. I have two wild stories. This is from Narratively’s Dylan Taylor-Lehman, “Jay J. Armes is a legendary and controversial Texan investigator with hooks for hands and six decades chasing criminals. This was his most epic murder case ever.” Everything about this is wild.
2. Wild story no. 2. Texas Monthly’s Kathy Vine, the story of Theodore Roosevelt Wright and the most insurance fraud I’ve ever seen in my life.
3. Nostalgia. The controls on Speed Racer’s car.
4. FieldMag on a new book by Sarah Decker Jones, the shelters, lean-tos, and huts of the Appalachian Trail. At the link, Jones lists her top 10 favorite shelters, which is cool. And if you’ve never gone to the Smoky Mountains, you definitely get a taste of what the trail is and can even walk a bit of it.
5. OutsideOnline with the fastest 5k in history, run by 23 year-old Ugandan Joshua Cheptegei, running it in 12:35.36. This article is interesting from the aspect that it is really about Cheptegei’s pace, which started fast and he kept that pace, slowly increasing his speed from the 2k through the 5k mark.
1. A night up in a tree in your own backyard. I think I’ve found my fall project when the weather turns.
2. I had never heard of Trini Lopez, but he was from Dallas and he was an incredible musician that was discovered by by Frank Sinatra. To bring things to modern day, Dave Grohl uses a 1967 Gibson Trini Lopez signature ES-335 to record all of the Foo Fighter albums.
3. Moving pictures from over 100 years ago: New York City 1911; Jerusalem 1897; Paris 1890s; Berlin 1902; San Sebastian 1913; London 1923; La Habana 1930; Sarajevo 1914; Madrid 1910; Marseille 1900; Belfast 1901; Amsterdam 1922; San Francisco 1906; Stockholm 1913; St. Petersburg 1914; Halifax 1902. You get the idea.
4. Via the LA Times, NBA superfan James Goldstein doesn’t know what he’s going to do if he cannot go to the NBA games.
“I can’t really grasp what it’s going to do to me,” he said.
5. You ever heard of Lesotho? Me neither. It’s a country within the borders of South Africa and along with Vatican City and San Marino, is one of three states completely surrounded by another singular country. Via SideTracked some beautiful pictures of a country that I’ve never even heard of before now. I’d also add that when I first looked at the photos, I thought I was looking at Europe.
2. Learning something new every day. I had never considered that Australia had slavery and this historical account is a good re-telling. But it wasn’t Africans, it was the Aboriginal people as well as 62,000 Melanisians (people from New Guinea to Fiji). Those people were bought and sold.
3. Eater’s Craig Mod walked over 600 miles across Japan just eating pizza toast. Imagine eating something foreign to a foreign country and walking for 600 miles. That’s from Durango to Denver. Mod would eat at Kissa, which are cafe’s or bars and this pizza toast is basically bar food for Japan.
Kissa — as they’re affectionately called — are suspended, like mosquitoes in amber, in a very specific moment in time. Japan operates on a non-Western calendar of eras, recently entering Reiwa this past May as Emperor Akihito abdicated the throne. Before Reiwa was Heisei, and before Heisei, Showa. Kissa are inextricably linked to Showa, an era that ran from 1926 to 1989. Showa is generally looked back upon as the “golden age” of modern Japan: technicolor, hardworking, patriarchal, industrial, with the romantic focus squarely on those postwar lean years. Showa is the jumble of alleyway bars in the now tourist-overrun Golden Gai nook of Tokyo. Showa is an old-school barber shop with hair tonics and hair liquids tucked between gleaming Mori and Mitsui skyscrapers. Showa is, above all, kissa.
Kissa, I presumed, like barbershops, would be everywhere on my journey. Many would have pizza toast. The kissa would connect the vast physical geographies of the walk. Pizza toast, the cosmic geography of my life in Japan.
4. Absolutely love this. The design of Lego computer screens. Fitsum’s Legos are all over the house and these screens bring back all sorts of memories as a kid who loved to play with Legos.
5. Via the BBC the most popular soccer kit is not really a soccer club, but an imaginary club. Who wants to do one for Lubbock or your hometown? If I had even a smidgen of graphic design ability I’d be all over this.
1. Want to know how to make me jealous? Show me a story about a guy traveling the world with his dog.
Everybody love everybody.
2. This is great. OutsideOnline tells the story of Bryan and Patrick, who quit their jobs to build a cabin in the middle of the woods with almost no experience.
During those last few weeks of work in the spring, if we had the energy, we stayed up late talking about where we wanted to be in ten or 20 years. There was something about building that was exactly as we had hoped. We loved that we weren’t staring at our computers all day. We loved how stiff our backs felt. Loved that our hands were so sore by dinner that squeezing a lime onto a taco felt like an Olympic event. We loved the excitement that would come from kicking the friggin’ bejeezus out of a task, screws flying into boards straight and strong, music blaring, working as a team without the need for communication beyond high-fives. Building felt like a natural extension of everything we valued in our lives: creativity, friendship, purpose, responsibility.
3. I love science and I love the fact that we’re still learning and what we think we know changes based on new evidence. Again, that’s a good thing too. Via National Geographic’s Kristin Romey, new evidence has been discovered that places humans in North America 30,000 years ago, which is twice as early as originally thought. The cool thing about this is that it is debatable if the evidence is correct. Still learning is a wonderful thing.
Then there’s the startling fact that the style of toolmaking—the distinctive way the stones appear to have been shaped—is utterly unique.
“It’s very curious that the assemblage is so different from anything anyone has known before,” says archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University. “How is it possible that it’s not related to anything previously found? Well, it’s possible.”
4. Sometimes slavery seems like something is so long ago, but these are the words the son of a slave. Via the Washington Post’s Sydney Trent, the words of Daniel Smith, 88 years old, and he listened to his father, Abram Smith, tell stories of being born a slave and the Civil War.
There was the whipping post in the middle of the plantation where enslaved people were tied up and beaten.
There was the lynching tree. Two enslaved people in chains had run away together, and rumors held that they had been hanged there. Later, when Dan Smith wanted to date white girls, his mother would warn: “I don’t want to have to cut you down.”
There was the wagon wheel. The enslaver accused a man on the plantation of an unspecified offense, and the man denied it. “The owner said, ‘You’re lying to me,’ and had the man and his whole family line up in the winter in front of a wooden wagon wheel,” Smith recounted. The enslaver ordered the man to kneel and lick the wheel’s metal rim. His tongue froze there until the desperate man pulled part of it away.
5. It’s ridiculous how much I see the world through my kids’ eyes, but from the BBC, DNA evidence suggests that 12.5 million Africans were traded as slaves from 1515 through the mid-19th Century and that most descendants of slaves have roots in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is Youssouf’s home country and cannot help but think that his although his direct family wasn’t affected, what about family members that may have been taken that are here in the USA now? What if he has close descendants here, right now? Obviously, the genetic test is something he’ll have to choose to do.
1. A four-day, 65-mile walk along the Texas coast from Texas Monthly’s David Courtney. This is just fantastic and this sounds like an ultra marathon waiting to happen.
And so, in late March we set off for an epic coastal excursion that would allow me to spend my days immersed in the fine art of beachcombing and my nights beneath a starry South Texas sky. While the rest of the world was hunkering down in isolation, I was going to partake in some social distancing of a different sort.
3. GQ’s Alex Shultz interviews Kilian Jornet, the Spaniard ultrarunner who has a pretty simple life and just runs all day and that sounds fantastic.
I wake up at 6 or 7, eat a small breakfast, and go for a longer workout. It could be a long day in the mountains—six or seven hours—or it could be two hours on flatter land trying to go fast. In the afternoon, I will go for a short one-hour run or ride on the bike.
4. Outside Online’s Alex Hutchinson writes about the difference between effort and pain. The funny thing for me is that pain used to happen quite a bit for me because I was putting forth a significant amount of effort and now I don’t think I feel pain, but my effort output gets pushed. If you haven’t almost shit yourself while working out, then you haven’t pushed yourself (I’m being extreme here, but it’s true for me).
5. This so reminded me of Reno 911, especially getting away and then being apprehended again.
FLIP OUT: A man who was allegedly blocking traffic with an acrobatic routine slipped out from police custody and attempted to cartwheel away, only to finally be detained. https://t.co/GqNAAG5crspic.twitter.com/V3Vb20Vgt7
1. I don’t even fish that much, but found this fascinating. Basically an untouched part of the world.
2. Bitter Southerner writes about burning the South. Not in that way, controlled burning to reduce wildfires.
By helping forest managers do more controlled burns, Warwick’s crew can help reduce the likelihood and severity of wildfires, enhance biodiversity, and increase the amount of usable habitat for species as big as the black bear and as small as the bog turtle, the smallest turtle in North America found only in the Southern Blue Ridge.
“At The Nature Conservancy, we realize we’re not going to save the world by just managing our 5,000 acres here and 4,000 acres there,” Warwick said. “In western North Carolina alone, there’s a million acres of public land that’s not getting fire like it should.”
By bringing fire back, everyone wins.
3. Via Outside Online, what we know about pain is probably, maybe wrong.
The first way we get chronic pain wrong, says Starrett, is that we assume it occurs in the muscles or bones or, in the case of psychological disorders, the mind. However, more recent work in the field of pain science reveals this isn’t the case. Persistent chronic pain is a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. In other words, it manifests from a combination of issues arising in our bodies, minds, and communities. While acute pain (e.g., a broken wrist, a sprained ankle, or transient anxiety or depression) recedes with targeted treatments, chronic pain does not. Thus, Starrett says, it requires a much more holistic view.
4.
5. I don’t have a lot going on this week and it’s been incredibly busy so getting 5 things to read and or look at have been challenging. Have a day. A good day.
2. I had never heard of the 1950 World Cup win of the United States over England, 1-0, via Men In Blazers:
Today is the 70th anniversary of USA 1 England 0, World Cup 1950. The greatest shock in Tournament history. An amatuer US team dropped England’s finest. The only goal scored by the man carried off the field here, Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian-born part-time dishwasher, who headed in a cross from the American captain/gym teacher Walter Bahr. Helped by a series of heroic saves from undertaker/goalkeeper Frank Borghi, the United States hung on for a heroic victory of which we should still be proud. While English papers proclaimed the death of English football, the American coach, Bill Jeffrey, proudly announced, “This is all we need to make the game go in the States!” It would prove to be just the first of many false dawns for U.S. soccer. Only one journalist, Dent McSkimming of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, saw the game live, and the New York Times, at first believing the reported victory to be a hoax when it came through on the wire, buried the story. We raise a glass to the memory of these American legends 🇺🇸🙌🍻
3. Via Outside Online the story of the volcano explosion at New Zealand’s White Island (just last year):
Last December, around 100 tourists set out for New Zealand’s Whakaari/White Island, where an active volcano has attracted hundreds of thousands of vacationers since the early 1990s. It was supposed to be a routine six-hour tour, including the highlight: a quick hike into the island’s otherworldly caldera. Then the volcano exploded. What happened next reveals troubling questions about the risks we’re willing to take when lives hang in the balance.
4. Via Domino, the story of Marcus Bridgewater, his garden in Houston, and his TikTok Garden Marcus (this made me smile):
In the years since adopting those first few plants, Bridgewater devoted himself to learning everything he could about gardening—and in the process he also learned more about himself. “A friend told me about some plants they saw on sale, and so I went and bought a lot of basically dead plants, and then I started doing everything I could to bring them back to life,” he says. “I realized that you can’t make anything grow, but you can foster an environment where growth is a byproduct of living. That was a profound life lesson.”
5. It’s kind of difficult (at least for me) not to love elephants and rhinoceros. Well, these are some fantastic photos of elephants in India and how they and farmers are trying to figure some things out, via SideTracked Magazine:
Even in the midst of mounting fear and anger, efforts are underway to help protect both elephants and farmers, and to help them find common ground. The situation for elephants throughout India is dire, but so many people work literally day and night to help fix this complicated crisis. NGOs such as the Wildlife Trust of India have identified 101 zones where the elephants’ natural movement between patches of forest is being blocked. They have engaged a wide network of local volunteers and NGOs to serve as Green Corridor Champions, such as Sonia Jabbar, inspiring the owner of the Nuxalbari Tea Estate to create safe passages, conduct awareness-raising campaigns for villagers, and supply tools to help people better coexist with the wildlife at their front door. Innovative solutions, such as alternative fencing, crop insurance or banks, new laws for train speed and signals, and research to track elephant movement and habits are all underway in the effort to decrease the conflict and create a healthy coexistence.
1. It’s still morning, right? It’s been great having a place to stay, but not so good not being at home. I love my home and I don’t know if a lot of people feel that way. The good thing is that I get to see my parents every day as we completely crash their pad. I feel like we are imposing, but we really aren’t. Also, when renovations are done at your house, the construction is messy, but the painting. The painting is what causes you to move out.
2. Via Conde Nast Traveler, how African-Americans helped shape the first U.S. National Parks.
“African American soldiers in 1899, 1903, and 1904 were some of the first park rangers in the world, not just in the United States,” says Shelton Johnson, a Yosemite park ranger who has committed himself to preserving and sharing the history of African American stewardship within the national parks through decades of work.
Between 1891 and 1913, the U.S. Army was the designated administrator of both Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park, with two troops of up to 60 men assigned to each park. Buffalo Soldiers—African American soldiers supposedly given that name because of their association to the western frontier—of both the Ninth Cavalry and 24th Infantry were included in these numbers. Racism, discrimination, bigotry, and the threat of violence were a large part of the experience of African American soldiers within the U.S. Army at this time. But for the bulk of the Buffalo Soldiers, who were veterans of either the Philippine-American or Spanish-American wars, joining these companies was a ticket toward financial security and thus became a gateway to being a guardian of the western wilderness.
“It makes sense why African Americans would join the army—because that was a path up and path out,” says Johnson. And no one took advantage of that path more than the ever industrious Charles Young. The third Black graduate of West Point University, Young became the military superintendent of Sequoia National Park in the summer of 1903.
3. Via Pocket, the story of Simo Hayha, the Finnish marksman who had 500 kils by sniper rifle.
I remember everything Things I can’t forget The way you turned and smiled on me On the night that we first met And I remember every night Your ocean eyes of blue How I miss you in the morning light Like roses miss the dew
I’ve been down this road before Alone as I can be Careful not to let my past Go sneaking up on me Got no future in my happiness Though regrets are very few Sometimes a little tenderness Was the best that I could do
5. It is Independence Day and I haven’t said a thing about it thus far. ESPN’s Katie Barnes on WNBA Maya Moore and he quest to free Jonathan Irons who was serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. Moore spent an entire year, literally quit her job, in order to see this through. Imagine that type of sacrifice for someone else’s freedom. Real freedom.
1. Via New Yorker’s Hilton Als, this article is about so much, but these two sentences on what racism is and how it intends on hurting the intended recipient.
The truth is that nothing is impersonal when it comes to racism, or the will to subjugate. Every act of racism is a deeply personal act with an end result: the unmooring diminishment of the person who is its target. If you have suffered that kind of erasure, you are less likely to know who you are or where you live.
2. Via The Guardian, this is somewhat insane, huge neolithic shafts were found about 2 miles away from Stonehenge, these shafts were are in a circle and go around the Durrington Walls. This was all built 4,500 years ago. Sometimes when you think that every square inch of this world has been kicked or viewed and then you discover 15′ shafts around Stonehenge that were dug with stone and bone. As an aside, did you know that the word “henge” is a thing? A henge is a prehistoric monument consisting of a circle of stone or wooden uprights.
3. Via the Bitter Southerner, two residents of Richmond and history professors, one African-American and one white, opine on the removal of confederate statues.
The proposed removal of Lee’s statue is an opportunity. It’s a chance for freedom to break through the dark clouds of oppression that the statues on Monument Avenue cast over us every day. But to get to that better freedom – a freedom that reflects our historical and contemporary diversity – I hope that after the Lee statue is removed we can pause, stand together, and look at those empty pedestals.
Empty pedestals are powerful symbols. In Prague during the Cold War, an empty pedestal that once supported a statue to Czechoslavak president Tomas Masaryk reminded people living under Soviet rule that they would one day emerge from the oppressiveness of an authoritarian regime.
Empty pedestals can serve a similar function in Richmond, and around the country. History won’t be erased after Lee’s statue joins the recently toppled statues of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis and the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus. For centuries, these structures supported white supremacy and obscured historical truths. Empty pedestals represent opportunities for us to grapple with history’s light and darkness. They are invitations to empathize with the perspectives of people previously marginalized from the interpretation of the past. As Edward Ayers, the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities at the University of Richmond told me, “What matters now is what we all do with what remains. We don’t have a blank slate or a clean sheet of paper on which to draw our plans, but history never does.”
4. I wish I could find this video, but a year or so ago, I ran across this New Zealander, who was living in Florida, and pointing out all of the differences between New Zealand and the U.S. One of the differences was that people get really worked up about politics. That’s not to say that people don’t care about things in New Zealand, but maybe here in the U.S. people are so much more zealous about the politics. I’m not using “zeal” in a good way here. Maybe we could just sort of chill the damn hell out.
He also wondered why there were not more roundabouts and clotheslines in the U.S. I put up a clothesline this spring and now I’m doing my laundry on cold wash and drying my clothes, and well, yeah, we need more clotheslines. I have no control over roundabouts.
2. Via Texas Monthly’s Wes Ferguson writes about a Mexican village, Nacimiento de los Negros in Coahuila, just south of Eagle Pass, that celebrates Juneteenth. Mexico had outlawed slavery decades before so many African-Americans made their way to Mexico:
Although few black people remain in northern Mexico, the region was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the United States. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, an underlying factor in Texas’s declaration of independence seven years later. In 1836, there were an estimated 5,000 slaves in Texas, a number that ballooned by 1860 to 182,500—more than 30 percent of the state’s population.
Freedom lay just across the Rio Grande. Maria Esther Hammack, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, estimates that as many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. Most of them fled from Texas, but she’s found evidence of slaves escaping to Mexico from as far away as North Carolina.
Of all things, Nacimiento means “birth” in Spanish.
3. My friend Travis Hale write this about his journey figuring out what Black Lives Matter has evolved over time with him.
4. Bicycling’s Peter Flax writes about Leo Rodgers, a bicyclist who lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident, “My purpose in life is some kind of inspiration,” he says. “I’m working on it.”
Seek The Substantial 