Losing My Edge
Upper-class digital nomads roam the desert like some long-lost plains tribe
Sad-dude sentiments meet lyrical playfulness in the dust
Indie Man Turns 30
My neighbor likes to park his vintage hot rod on the curb out front of his house. On Saturday mornings he removes the mesquite pods that drop onto the windshield from a nearby tree and he rinses the dust from the exterior with a garden hose. He opens the doors and wipes the seats with a microfiber cloth that’s been sprayed with a solution. He cleans under the wipers and around the hubcaps before he dries the exterior with a towel. Then he goes back inside his house. The hot rod is a turquoise Mercury Comet.
I live what Don Delillo calls “a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.” I have lived here for three months, or 24 years, or since God breathed life into dust. I know my neighbor never takes his Comet out for a drive because my baby daughter and I observe it parked on the curb from the big bay window in our living room, in one-to-three hour intervals, every day, from 6:00 AM …
L.L. Bean Breaks the Sacred Covenant
The trusted brands of yore now make crap destined for a landfill
Private equity is to blame
Peaches optimized for Instagram feeds last a disturbingly long time, during which they never actually ripen.
Inheritances can come in the form of cash, property, heirlooms, genetic predispositions, and also stories. A story I’ve been told since I was old enough to sign my application for the Junior Mayflower Society is that I’m directly descended from William Bradford, the longtime governor of Plymouth Colony. My grandparents were the ones who presented me with the application. It turned out to be the only legacy I’d receive from them — a packet of authenticated paperwork, like I was an American Kennel Club show dog.
Needing to know more of my family history than this one exalted detail, I turned to Ancestry.com. Anyone who has ever paid for a premium membership to Ancestry understands its addictiveness, combining the dopamine rush of playing a slot machine with that of scrolling social media (you never know what ancestor you’ll uncover next!). It was during one of my Ancestry binges that I …
Oral History
Ora Cogan stands in the clearing like a summer goddess draped in black satin
She lives in an old mining town in British Columbia after working as a silversmith and doing other cool shit
“It’s not just about dressing up in muumuus and playing a mandolin.”
I was living in rural Northern California the summer that Ora Cogan’s “Cowgirl” came out, and when I first heard it in my friend’s truck on our way to the river we were dead silent as we let it wash over us, absorbed in delicious loneliness. Now I am following the sound of her fiddle through Laurelhurst Park on a sunny spring afternoon in Portland. Amid the picnickers and the dog-walkers, she sits in the clearing like a goddess draped in black satin. Her dark eyes, framed by long, chocolate-brown hair, gaze at the instrument tucked under her chin, her cowboy boots kicked off to the side, a snake tattoo creeping up her leg. She pauses her reverie to greet me with affable warmth. I kick off my own boots to join her in the grass.
Raised among the rugged shores of Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Cogan possesses the soulful disposition of someone who has spent her whole life humbled by the …
