Howdy! I’m Nate. This is my personal blog: notes on books, public lands, the Internet, and whatever I’m thinking about.
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Snow is a novel set in Kars, a remote, snowed-in town in eastern Turkey. A poet called Ka returns from political exile, ostensibly to investigate a wave of suicides among young girls from conservative Muslim families. The investigation is the reason he’s there. It is not really what the book is about.
I got to visit Redwood National & State Parks in Northern California. Here are 5 notes from the trip.
I grew up in the Philippines. I last visited about 20 years ago. So when I saw the latest Lonely…
The short version? Georgia Veterans checks all the boxes of a state park…but it doesn’t feel like a Georgia state park. It’s one of the wildcards.*
Cimarron is a western published in 1929, and it covers the settlement of Oklahoma – which was one of the very last pieces of the old frontier to be opened up.
The Cohutta Wilderness is the largest designated Wilderness area east of the Mississippi river. It is only about a 2 1/2 hour drive from Atlanta, so I have been able to spend quite a bit of time there.
I picked up Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson on a lark at the library. It was during the PR hype for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it looked like a solid book.
America’s national grasslands are basically National Forests…but grasslands. They’re managed by the US Forest Service for multiple use – wildlife, recreation, grazing, scenery, and ecosystem services, but also mining, oil drilling, and gas production. They’re part of the National Forest System, which means they’re managed under a different mandate than most Bureau of Land Management land.
Every year, the ABB Baldor-Reliance plant in Athens, Georgia opens its doors to employees and their families.
Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion Is possibly one of the best teaching tools I’ve ever seen on the internet. The concept is simple. There have been about a hundred billion humans to have ever lived. We each are occupying one of those lives, but what would it have been like to be another life?
This long, run forming a pool is off-trail within the Cohutta Wilderness, Georgia, about 2 miles from the north Conasauga River Trailhead. The river has pooled up before a short cascade.
This bend is off-trail within the Cohutta Wilderness, Georgia, about 2 miles from the north Conasauga River Trailhead. The river is slicing across hard, exposed granite.
Wilderness has so many benefits. But economic benefits are what policymakers & politicians care about. The USFS put that report in a PDF. I’ve rehosted & reformatted it for easier access for all.
I like to keep track of the books I read. But I do less with TV. I don’t watch a…
This post from Hanna Horvath is such an incredible piece on the *total* costs of car ownership -> https://yourbrainonmoney.substack.com/p/the-best-financial-advice-i-can-give
In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a…
What a beautiful website & a beautiful reminder of the absolute abundance that many of us live with compared to our very recent ancestors – https://ordinaryabundance.com/
US Energy Cost Explorer is a classic website that takes open, publicly available data on energy costs and makes it usable, useful & interesting – https://energy-maps.com/
