The Upper Middle Class Trap via Nick Maggiulli
I see this everywhere -> https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-upper-middle-class-trap/
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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The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls by Adam Bonica
This -> https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-looks-permanent-until-it
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40 Little Sayings That Have Held Up Over 40 Years
I’ve been around for a full 40 years now. I, like everyone on Earth, still have no real idea about…
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The Wonder of Modern Drywall by Yassine Meskhout
We take the modern world completely for granted -> https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-wonder-of-modern-drywall?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZ_F90_8PNfpEYF00xv8NJPA
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Flannery O’Connor Predicts The Internet Troll
Flannery O’Connor had possibly the keenest eye for the characters we meet in life. This passage struck me as either ahead of its time…or just timeless.
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90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry
This is so true -> https://interconnected.org/home/2026/02/06/sanding
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Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and the Reading Unlock
Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and the Reading Unlock -> https://www.readtrung.com/p/warren-buffett-and-the-reading-unlock
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What the actual science says about “brain rot”
I love the channel Howtown on YouTube. They do an excellent job wading through academic research on trendy topics. This piece on “Brain Rot” is especially apt for the 2020s.
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Where Do the Children Play? via eli Stark-Elster
The biggest misconception about American childhood -> https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play
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Why read novels? via Dynomight
Love this -> https://dynomight.net/novels/
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Salaam Springs at Grant Park
Salaam Springs (aka “The Pond”) is the main only water feature in Atlanta’s Grant Park. It’s not huge and it’s more of a stormwater catchment than a landscaped lake TBH. However, it was re-built & re-landscaped a few years ago with a viewing deck, a working water fountain, and native plants around the edge.
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A World Appears by Michael Pollan
Pollan has a rare talent. He goes beyond journalism into something harder to name — a deep, patient synthesis of science, history, and lived experience that makes even the most tangled topics feel useful and graspable. He did it with food in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He did it with drugs. And A World Appears is him doing it with the biggest, strangest question of all: what is it actually like to have a mind?
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The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Debord’s central argument is that the “spectacle” goes well beyond what most of us picture when we hear that word — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a presidential election. He argues that any representation of the world that turns people into passive spectators qualifies.
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A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk is one of the Top 5 best novels I’ve ever read.
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Appalachian Trail Backcountry Shelters, Lean-Tos & Huts by Sarah Decker
Sarah Decker went out and photographed and documented every single shelter on the Appalachian Trail — all 2,200 miles of it. The result is a beautiful, deeply niche reference book that, for the right reader, is an absolute treasure.
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Conasauga River in Summer
Conasauga River in Georgia’s Cohutta Wilderness, Chattahoochee National Forest
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Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger
Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger is a coffee table reference book put out by Rizzoli. I’ve collected nine of these Rizzoli books now, and they’re all lovely — the kind of thing you keep on the coffee table not as decoration but because you actually flip through them.
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Miracles & Wonder by Elaine Pagels
Pagels is one of the original researchers of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and a lot of the Coptic and Gnostic texts that scholars are still working through today. She’s been doing serious, primary-source work in this space for decades. I did not know she was still actively publishing so it’s genuinely impressive to see her add another strong book to an already massive bibliography.
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A History of the World in 500 Walks by Sarah Baxter
The premise is straightforward: if history happened in real places, you can go stand in those places. And when you do, history stops being a mental movie and starts feeling like what it actually was — real people, real terrain, probably a lot more boring and weird than your imagination gives it credit for.
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Gospel of Thomas Edited by Stevan Davies
I picked up the Gospel of Thomas recently while working through Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I hadn’t read the Gospel of Thomas in a very long time, and MacCulloch’s treatment of the early church controversies reminded me just how much insight this text provides.
