Here’s to unlimited new years
The time between the holidays is odd. You wake up the day after Christmas and it’s all over except the returns. There’s a morning-after sadness, the hangover that follows a binge on sentimentality and anxiety and, yes, genuine good cheer toward men. You’ve kissed all the cheeks and patted the backs and now we all...
Go fight cancer tomorrow night
The past year has brought hope that the thing that kills you won’t be cancer. Your demise might come from something even more hideous and protracted, but there’s a better chance that it won’t be cancer. More important to everyone but you, kids are getting more cancer-fighting tools. As the New York Times reported earlier...
Nature shower with a friend in 2013
Here’s a New Year’s resolution you’ll want to follow through on: take more nature showers, ideally with a friend. Or friends. As is usually the case with good ideas, there’s nothing new about this except the way we talk about it. “Taking a nature shower” is just another way of saying you should walk in...
An avalanche of avalanche reportage
The New York Times has weighed in mightily on last February’s fatal Tunnel Creek avalanche, which took three lives near Washington’s Stevens Pass ski resort. Over six months, a handful of writers and graphic designers and web gurus assembled text, videos, maps, slide shows and sound files. The result is a gorgeous package, by turns...
A Curious Obsession
In early March of 1979, Ranger Steve and I were traveling Highway 2 from East Glacier, Montana to Kalispell. Having just reviewed an epic production of Barefoot in the Park by the East Glacier Players, we were headed west to do a little alpine sliding. The entire area was besieged with slides and major avalanches...
You should be embarrassed if you never feel awkward
You arrive in a new place—say, New York or New Delhi—and you don’t know there’s cheap public transportation from the airport to the city center. You take a cab, pay an exorbitant ransom to be released at your hotel, then realize you could have done it faster/cheaper/more comfortably by bus or subway. But you didn’t...
Merry Christmas: Four more years, half of them pretty good
The Lancet just published a report—actually, a series of seven papers—known as the Global Burden of Disease. It’s a kraken, a beast, a megillah of data, with contributions from experts in more than 300 institutions in 50 countries. The good news: you’re living longer. The bad news: only about half of those new years will...
Two more things on glamping
Everyone should self-impose a limit on the number of stories they write on glamping. Like one a month and maybe ten in a lifetime. So apologies, but two things have crossed my desk that demand to be relayed to anyone who has read this far: First, you need to see the array of products...
New glamping option looks like a Tylenol capsule. Or candy.
It’s hard to believe that the hotel industry is threatened by glamping. For two reasons: one, it feels like a fad, a flash in the pan. And two, even though the media finds it a catchy subject, not that many people are going to give up the Super 8 or Hyatt for a night in...
You don’t want anything for Christmas
Young people hate old people for many reasons, most of them justifiable. This time of year they hate us because there is no obvious gift for us. We have most of what we want. What we don’t have we can live without. If we are going to get something more, we very particular about what...
Alan Simpson gets after AARP
As we speed toward the fiscal cliff—with its radical cuts in spending and steep tax hikes and, if you believe the press, the recession that combo will inevitably cause—the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Plan has been getting a lot of renewed attention. (Including an interesting Atlantic article today, which notes that report of the National Commission...
In biking as in life, listen to the women
And then give them what they want. That’s one conclusion found in City Cycling (MIT Press 2012), which the Rutgers Focus calls “a guide to the urban cycling renaissance underway in most countries of the western industrialized world.” The book, co-edited by professors John Pucher (from Rutgers ) and Ralph Buehler (Virginia Tech), contains...
