Do you work in conservation science, particularly outside the U.S.? Did you lose your job or funding for your job because of cuts to U.S. federal agencies? Do you want to talk about it? DM me please. (This is for a @biographic.bsky.social story) [Iceland photo for attention only]

Tom Homan took a bag of cash from an undercover FBI agent the right way. by Ezra Klein

My position on AI is simple and eminently reasonable: trace the cord back to the wall and unplug it.

In 1958, Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ was banned from the radio by FCC: as far as I know, it’s still the only instrumental ever banned. Recorded Live: 11/19/1974 • Winterland • San Francisco, CA

From the Archive: A review essay on “All Is Lost,” a survival film starring the great Robert Redford lost at sea, in a solo struggle with nature. “The film is a parable about our collective struggle with life at the end of modernity, as our fragile certainties are giving way and breaking down.”

Something good: a new, nonprofit newsroom run by some wonderful, experienced folks (core crew from Outside mag's glory days) dedicated to journalism about American public lands! Looks like the plan is to collaborate a fair bit with other outlets.

Oh, wow! Thrilled by this, and a huge thanks to both @longreads.com, which has done so much to make the web a place for good writing, and @placesjournal.bsky.social, which is one of the preeminent venues for anything even remotely related to place, landscape, space, architecture, etc.

In partnership with The Writers Project of Ghana and the British Council, Aeon Media is hosting an intensive writing workshop for anyone looking to master the art of the nonfiction essay. If you're based in Ghana and would like to participate, please email [email protected] aeon.co

This summer I brought @nathankhensley.bsky.social's Action Without Hope to one of the most naturally beautiful places I go each year, on the intuition that this is where you should read books in the environmental humanities. This is about Nathan’s excellent book and my questionable intuition.

I can almost see the headline from Ezra Klein’s next editorial.

@daeganmiller.bsky.social This Radical Land was amazing btw press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class. This is Kirk's legacy. You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

Stay tuned! To celebrate three years of FlakPhoto on Substack, I'm giving away two copies of Stephen Shore's new book in my newsletter. Watch your inbox for details!

I rarely read editorials because I typically find them disappointing in their thoughtlessness…but I read Ezra Klein’s, and it is truly, utterly stupid. Not just thoughtless, but stupid. That this is what counts as mainstream Democratic discourse fills me with despair.

We was a vocal homophobe, transphobe, antisemitic racist who espoused bigoted views—quite literally—until his last conscious breath. He posed with Kyle Rittenhouse. He called to free Paul Pelosi’s attacker. This is who @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social says was “practicing politics the right way.”

Many apt comparisons to make between the challenges of painting and those of writing, for instance, I am always struggling to create for my readers the illusion of (my) depth.

Four years ago, on a dream assignment for an essay with photographer @brentmathison.bsky.social. Looking for the ghost of Eadweard Muybridge under the Thousand Mile Tree in Utah.

In 2014, Anita Sarkeesian canceled an event at Utah State after a credible assassination threat because the school’s response was that Utah allows guns on college campuses. People have warned about this kind of violence for years. But they weren’t the people the powers at be wanted to protect.

Good morning from my new favorite tree, this polypore-studded grey birch.

I guess it was smart of the Supreme Court to release its most racist decision since Plessy on the same day it was confirmed that Trump used his signature in the place of a vagina in his pedophile love letter/birthday card. I'll admit, I can't top that.

I keep telling friends about @joannapocock.bsky.social's Greyhound, one of my favorite summer reads. @orionmagazine.bsky.social pulished an excerpt. Here's a taste. @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social orionmagazine.org/article/grey...

Been looking forward to this one, from @snarlsdickens.bsky.social, for a while:

This is such an important thread, but this post really made me sad, because the broader scholarly infrastructure has (been) eroded to the point that knowledge exchange simply can't exist in the way it used to and there's little that journals can do about it. Because that infrastructure was people.

This essay from Maggie Millner in the @yalereview.bsky.social on Mary Oliver is excellent. A poet friend and I have been texting fiendishly all night as we read it long-distance. yalereview.org/article/mill...

I reviewed the experience of being older than I used to be when I would see the Flecktones in the nineties: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/left-of-old/

I have been holding on buying this book because I have so many other books to read, but I keep thinking I need to buy it and read it. Thanks for this reminder, Daegan!

desert snaps chevron - 4:30am 9.2.25

An Unfinished Atlas consists of “essays by authors of color, each of whom has been asked to select a place — intimately known or not; famous or minor; historical or contemporary — and to write this place into the record of the continent we now call North America.” [via @placesjournal.bsky.social]

Every time you use ChatGPT or something like it, you’re helping to train an algorithm that is actually being developed to do things like this

@orionmagazine.bsky.social have printed a short extract from GREYHOUND (published by Soft Skull Press in the US and @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social in the UK). "Greyhound buses are part of an overlooked ecosystem. ... They are more library than shopping mall..." #greyhound #OrionMagazine

I guarantee that you're not going to do anything better today than to carefully read this essay on dogs, salmon, and mushing (which, like all good essays, is really an inquiry into existence) by @brdemuth.bsky.social in @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. Extraordinary. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

If anyone is interested in some of the books that helped inform GREYHOUND, here is a short list. As summer comes to an end, there is still time for one more road trip, even if it's a literary one... fitzcarraldoeditions.com/2025/08/joan...

often possession is the whole of the law

If the recommendation to Democrats was to speak plainly, casually, like a normal person having a real conversation rather than like a politician stumbling through jargon, they’d be gushing about Mamdani and telling Dems to be more like him. But they’re not, because they really mean something else.

Can’t heap enough praise on this book, which feels like will become a touchstone of the environmental humanities, the kind of book that bleeds over into serious nonfiction, enviro/nature writing, eco criticism, etc. Just a stunning, brilliant work.

Down to our last copies of Dropout City. Help us make this record OOP: "Trummors fourth album, Dropout City, is located along that ancient road full of domesticity and dust, adobe and acid, turquoise and trouble, that runs between John Phillips’ Los Angeles and New Mexico’s mountain air."

Thinking of doubling down on the worthlessness of living the unexamined life, on the intuition that the best defense of the humanities might be offense.

seize the means of digestion

And who woulda thought Putin would be Neville Chamberlain in this scenario?

“Deep relationship is a sensation of the particular, held in the eager tilt of a lead dog’s ears before a run or the feel of an old scar left by a salmon’s tooth.” An essay on the mighty but sometimes overlooked chum salmon & dogs & rivers & love #envhist #rivers www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Lovely to now be able to announce that the first showing of my new work 'The Edge of Ruin', will be as part of the exhibition programme for The Northern Eye Photography Festival 2025 run by @orielcolwyn.bsky.social in North Wales from October 1st-31st. www.northerneyefestival.co.uk/exhibition-2...

For reasons - living with the knowledge that our public statements might be surveilled - I'd like to re-share an earlier essay of mine, in @aeon.co, about the implications this holds for the life of the mind: aeon.co/essays/the-d...

New podcast, with @joannapocock.bsky.social on her ace new book Greyhound www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/joan...

Jesus FUCKING Christ

Just had reason to revisit this classic, which, for me, was every bit as influential as Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness.” That revisionist turn feels a very long time ago—the mid 90s!—and it is a strange feeling to reapproach these essays with a feeling of nostalgia.

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

i think they're handing this medal out to dipshits *because* it's gone to people like rosa parks and MLK

Area Critic (Me) Needs New Job. Reach out if you want me to write for you! Doesn't have to be reviews!

So sad to see this (from the newest London Review of Books):