Latest from the Blog

Wagons Across Wyoming
Hello friends and family! This (admittedly overdue) blog post really starts a few weeks ago in Elko, Nevada. I’d stopped off to gamble in a smoky casino and eat a pasty, the Cornish hand-pie beloved by coal miners, and then decided to visit a museum about the migrations of the mid-1800s that brought successive waves […]
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The Casinos and Cathouses of Nevada
Greetings from the frontier! Americans like to complain that they aren’t free anymore, but Nevada is as libertarian as it gets: cheap booze, legal weed, roadside brothels, indoor smoking, no mask mandates, sky-high speed limits, and gun-friendly businesses. You can even gamble in grocery stores, laundromats and gas stations, playing their “loose” and “liberal” slots. […]
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American Credulity
Hello friends and family! I was listening to the book Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen the other day, which is about the history of the American penchant for the fantastical and untrue, beginning with the very first pilgrims and fortune-seekers who settled Virginia and New England in the 1600s. Most of these settlers were wide-eyed naïfs […]
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The Brown Bits of the Map
Hello friends and family! If you open Google Maps and zoom out on the map of California, you’ll see the southern part of the state is divided into two halves: the green and the brown. The green covers the coastal cities and the forests of the mountain ranges that hem those cities in. I am […]
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How To Avoid Being Featured on a True Crime Podcast
Hello friends and family! Greetings from California, where I’ve been sight-seeing in Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, the Salton Sea and Anza-Borrego State Park. These are magical places that I’m probably going to write about in my next blog post, but not today. Today I’m on another tangent, one that is probably only of interest to […]
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Passing Time in the Desert
Hello, friends and family! They say Phoenix is one of the fastest growing municipalities in America. It sprawls in walled subdivisions out into the far reaches of the desert, and its gated neighbourhoods have lawns so green and canals so dry it makes me want to puke. But the rest of the Arizona desert is […]
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