Today is the LAST DAY to sign up for my How To Tell One Story online writing course for 2025. If you haven’t heard people (me) talking about it before, it is:
- a six-week, 12-email course designed to help you get one good written narrative nonfiction story on the page
- comprised of brief emails and assignments (a 3- to 6-minute read plus a 10- to 30-minute writing exercise)
- proven to be very satisfying according to the 27 people who have taken the post-course survey (and the 180+ other people who have taken the course and complained about it)
- usually $249 but $199 this time around
- only offered every three months
If you’re interested in more information and/or signing up for the course, the deadline is 11:59 p.m. MST tonight (February 17th)—here’s the link to the course page.
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Please meet Naoki, a Japanese fly fisherman who has dedicated his life to old reggae records (and fishing for tarpon), who says this partway through this short film: “This is part of my adventure of my life. I’m still working on it.” (video)
I am not good at cooking eggs (I am trying to get better at it), so when I see a video titled “Egg master flow-state” and the thumbnail is 12 freshly-cracked eggs on a restaurant kitchen’s flat-top, I’m going to watch it. Some people enjoy watching professional golfers who are the best in the world at what they do; I enjoy watching professional egg-cookers.
I was an on-and-off listener to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast over the years, and I was kind of shocked to hear that a) he was ending it and b) it had been going on for 16 years. Here’s a quick tribute The Atlantic published [GIFT LINK], which contained this quote: “[T]he platform Maron helped create—the low-key chat show—has exploded into an industry worth billions. Comedians of all stripes now host back-and-forth chats, though few display the compassion Maron is known for.”
Last week, I finished reading Ruth Whippman’s book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, because Hilary picked it up a few weeks earlier and sold me on how thought-provoking it was. She also hosted a four-week online “book club” with a bunch of moms (and our friend Jonathan). In reading the book, I had the dual perspective of being a dad of a toddler and as a man who grew up in some pretty traditionally “masculine” spaces. So Hilary and I both have our dog-eared copies of the book and a date night coming up so we can chat about it uninterrupted by (MOM!) our (MOM!) little (MOM!) guy. You are not invited to our date night, but you can get a sense of some of her dogeared pages/underlined sections in the last Substack she wrote about it: Why Don’t I Call My Son “Sweetheart?”
On Wednesday, I had my first run of the fall season in which I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe should have worn pants for this one,” and while I vastly prefer running in shorts, I live in western Montana, where we definitely have a “pants weather” season. So I will be wearing the Trail Tights from newsletter sponsor Janji because they’re nice and also because they have SEVEN POCKETS. The Women’s 7/8 Trail Tights have five pockets. (both of them come in reflective prints, which I am quite excited about for the dark mornings and evenings that are coming soon)
We interviewed writer Jared Beasley on The Trailhead podcast a couple weeks ago, which required me to read his book The Endurance Artist, which was fantastic, as was our conversation with Jared, who is a real writer who knows what the hell he’s doing, and who was willing to put in the work to get to know Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, the quirky (to put it lightly) guy who dreamed up the hardest footrace in the world, the Barkley Marathons.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts
I remain a huge fan of Brandon Stanton and his Humans of New York work, and could not be more excited that the project has grown to the point that he can take over Grand Central Station, remove every single ad, and choose from more than 10,000 of his portraits to put on an exhibition starring everyday/extraordinary folks he’s interviewed. (via Kottke)
This Blackbird Spyplane piece Hilary sent me yesterday echoes something I have quoted my friend Forest as saying to me once, a piece of advice that lives rent-free in my head—You don’t look cool looking at your phone. My favorite part: “This is the real cure for “phone addiction” that no one has considered. Forget lightphones, forget apps that lock you out of other apps. Humans are a deeply image-conscious species. Just think about how dumb you look when you’re on your phone, and how you would never willingly look that dumb by any other means.”
Also: If you missed my post yesterday about celebrating 10 years of running ultramarathons, here’s that, and if you’d rather just watch a video about it, here you go:
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