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Rolf reflects on the music of Elliott Smith, Nirvana, and his own Pacific NW grunge band, Swizzlefish
How Rolf Ruined the 1990s: A personal history of my grunge-bandwagon band
“The most beautiful thing in the world,” from Chloe Cooper Jones’s “Easy Beauty”
My father had an idea for a children’s book. He recited the idea to me many times when I was little. It was to be a story about beauty. It begins with a father saying good night to his daughter. The daughter is afraid to be alone and so she begs the father to stay…
Walk and Talk: Notes from a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand
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An ambulatory field report from a “Walk and Talk” moving salon across northern Thailand
In Praise of Loitering, by Ross Gay
I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in…
“How to Write About Africa,” by Binyavanga Wainaina
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black…
Essential tips and strategies for telling travel stories, with Andrew McCarthy
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Essential tips and strategies for telling travel stories, with Andrew McCarthy
“The Faces,” by Robert Creeley (1983)
The faces with anticipated youth look out from the current identifications, judge or salesman, the neighbor, the man who killed, mattering only as the sliding world they betoken, the time it never mattered to accumulate, the fact that nothing mattered but for what one could make of it, some passing, oblique pleasure, a pain immense…
To show and to tell: How to write nonfiction from a “double perspective”
By Phillip Lopate In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective,…
What it’s like to spend a full year traveling within a day’s radius of your home
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What it’s like to spend a full year traveling within a day’s radius of your home, with Alastair Humphreys
Notes on “Walk and Talk” (a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand)
Late last year I had the honor of participating in a seven-day, 100-kilometer “Walk and Talk” across northern Thailand. Organized by futurist Kevin Kelly and writer-photographer Craig Mod, a “Walk and Talk” mixes long-distance hiking during the day with an in-depth, one-topic-per-night “Jeffersonian conversation” over dinner each evening. Our ten hand-picked participants, strangers to each…
Sports, superstitions, and sacraments: A Deviate Super Bowl Special (2024 remix)
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Deviate Super Bowl Special: Superstitions, sacraments, and the weird emotional power of sports