Blog
My Own Private Graduate School
Every now and then I submit myself to a hugely daunting assignment: Fashion an entertaining, literary 2,000-word narrative profile from one hour-long phone interview with the subject and whatever you can glean from the Internet. It’s a task verging on the absurd. How can you possibly make this work? To be sure, it would be much easier if I could follow the person around and spend unlimited time with them and interview dozens of colleagues and friends. But this isn’t possible. The assignments come from…
Your Life List for the Next 365 Days
Get out of your comfort zone. See something you've never seen before. Do something really crazy, like slam on the gas pedal and hold it there on the salt flats of central Utah. These are the sorts of things that keep you alive and happy and energized—and they're really not as hard as it seems to pull off. The bucket list may seem like a tired trope of modern-day media, but I dare you to read this one, The 365-Day Bucket List, which I wrote for Outside…
Need A New Place to Live?
Every September, Outside magazine publishes a big feature celebrating the new best towns in America, determined by reader votes. It's a ritual that is both preposterous and fun, and I'm grateful to have been asked to be a part of it for a number of years running. This year I wrote about the four western towns, including the feisty runner-up, Port Angeles. Holy cow, did that Olympic Peninsula hamlet come together for the contest. People put placards in their lawns. Businesses wrote out pleas to vote on their…