August 25, 2025 Dispatch A Snake Hunt in God’s Country By Jake Maynard All photos courtesy of the author. The middle of nowhere, a hole-in-the-wall, flyover counties—even the U.S. Census Bureau defines rurality as a type of absence: “all areas not classified as urban.” An anarchist friend recently told me that a place is only called rural if people don’t give a shit about it. (You’ll never hear Aspen or the Napa Valley described as “rural.”) Much of my life as a writer is spent seeking a better definition, one more devoted to fullness than negation, which is what sent me recently to a rattlesnake hunt, which was also a craft fair, gun sale, horseshoe tournament, and chicken BBQ designed to raise funds for the volunteer fire department of the unincorporated village of Cross Fork, Pennsylvania, near where I grew up. For the nonhunter, like myself, the snake hunt is more pageant than sport. Eastern timber rattlesnakes—distant, misunderstood, definitely not a metaphor—are rounded up in the mountains and brought down so that people can safely look at them. After the weekend, the snakes are released unharmed. To view them, or so I’ve assumed, is to reset one’s sense of wonder, to deepen one’s sense of what, exactly, is so often flown over. It’s also a great excuse for day drinking. Cross Fork lies in Potter County (motto: GOD’S COUNTRY) in North Central Pennsylvania, hemmed in on all sides by state forest, which covers almost half the county and much of the counties to the south and west. In late June the foliage in the folded hills is many shades of green—Kelly, pine, pickle, kelp, even the green of nuclear ooze. My wife, Noelle, and I took the drive from Pittsburgh on shoestring roads, the temperature dropping. We passed the turn for my hometown, a little to the west, and kept going. Read More
August 22, 2025 First Person The Taste of Pencils By Kate Colby Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Photograph by Christopher Michel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. I remember the taste of Mr. Bubble. I know the flavor of Milk-Bones. While I’ve forgotten so many details of my life and days, even if they’re implicit in my brain, it seems to me I’ve never forgotten a taste. In sixth grade I discovered a pleasurable combination of shrill taste and buzzing sensation (shrill and buzzing both technically characterizing sound, the faculty of whose perception seems to warrant extra adjectives) in the three-way interaction between a particular kind of metal, my braces, and tongue. The crimped metal band holding a pencil’s eraser (the unpainted silver kind, not the gold or Dixon Ticonderoga green) produced the effect, and since I spent a good deal of time at that age sitting at a desk, I savored the phenomenon frequently and without anyone noticing, because it’s socially acceptable—even a teacher-approved sign of concentration—to have a pencil in one’s mouth. The taste in my memory of early adolescence is an indescribable metallic sensation and the attendant flavors of a pencil—cedar, No. 2 graphite, rubber eraser. The metal band is called a ferrule. In looking it up I found countless websites dedicated to pencils and their appreciation, even names for different effects produced by sharpening them, e.g., “collar creep,” which is that annoying thing where the wood extends to the vertex of the sharpened tip on one side. Read More
August 21, 2025 Diaries Horseshoe Crab Diary By Grace Byron Photograph by Grace Byron. July 6, 2024 My obsession with horseshoe crabs started small. D. and I went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on a bird walk. The two women next to us turned out to work at an independent competitor to the massive plushie company Squishmallow, and I listened to them talk about the qualities of superior felt as D. watched an egret scarf down an eel across the marsh. Both of us grew up in the Midwest, but it’s D. who loves birding and camping. I enjoy nature as much as the next woman, but I love the feeling of returning to a solid bed surrounded by four sturdy walls. It wasn’t until we walked back to the nature center, stocked with stuffed animals both real and fake, that I came alive. Eagles, hummingbirds, owls, and mice, all lined up in glass cages and offered as stuffies, intended for kids below the age of ten. I idly wound up a small, plastic horseshoe crab and watched it race along the linoleum. Then we turned the corner into a boardroom and discovered a small exhibit on the crabs, a series of nightscape photographs depicting hordes of the ancient critters scampering under streetlights on the beach. The four-hundred-million-year-old hard-shell survivors mating, spawning, and molting on the beach at night under the streetlights, unbothered by the dawn of new technology. The strange, spiderlike crabs looked uncanny, with shells like the backs of stingrays. Their barnacles and the years of life they’d spent living underwater, chowing down on tiny fish and algae, lent them a gray-green hue. Like Paleozoic monsters, alien crustaceans knocked out of time and space. They inspired the same fear and delight that walking in the woods once did when I was a child: the fear and delight of discovery. Read More
August 19, 2025 First Person The Man in the New Boots By Chandler Fritz Photograph by David Blakeman. It was about an hour before rider check-in when I realized I didn’t have a cup. This was a problem because my old buddy Joshua was fond of telling me about how he had watched a hoof strike between his legs and seen the fate of countless future generations pass before his eyes. My wife was already worried about the microplastics in my balls, so I knew I had to take precautions. The problem was that my mom had somehow forgotten to save my old jockstrap from high school. “We could stop by Dick’s,” my sister suggested. “So you can protect your nuts.” But we were already several weeks deep into the local Little League season, and Dick’s was fresh out. We headed instead to the Walmart off the 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. The sun hung high on a late winter afternoon in Phoenix. “You know, you had an uncle who was a bull rider,” my mom said, staring out the windshield. Nobody knew why I was doing this, so there was a felt need to make sense of things. “Which side?” “My mom’s side.” “Her father’s side were all rodeo clowns,” my dad said. “Doesn’t make a difference,” my sister said flatly. She looked out at the blue glow of the McDowells, still wet from the weekend rain. “Mom’s adopted. You don’t have any of those excuses in you.” Read More
August 18, 2025 First Person Without Your Love By Laurie Stone Screenshot from the trailer for Paper Moon (1973). The other night, Richard and I watched Paper Moon (1973) on Kanopy, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The film is brilliantly shot, written, directed, and, most transportingly, acted—by Tatum O’Neal and her father, Ryan O’Neal. Tatum was eight at the time of filming. The first shot is her face, filling the screen, as she stands beside her mother’s grave, in the grainy light of black-and-white, dust bowl Depression America. The first shot is Tatum’s face, and in a sense the movie is a biography of that face. Tatum’s character is called Addie, and she quickly hooks up with a grifter named Moses, played by Ryan, who may or may not be her father. There’s a softness about Ryan O’Neal. It’s in his eyes. He has a light touch. If he placed his hand on you, the hand would ask how much pressure you wanted. He has the eyes of a dog wondering if it’s time to go out, and this yearning helps him pull off his grift of selling Bibles to grieving widows he finds in local obits. He’s not great at this work. Addie is a natural, Addie with the genius of little girls before they learn about their gender assignment and lose all hope for their lives. Read More
August 14, 2025 On Photography Death at the Zoo By Kate Zambreno Jumbo the elephant. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Zoological Society of London. We begin the essay with an uncited photograph from history. Roland Barthes speaks of photographs of children from history, their innocence and morbidity. To look at an old photograph of children is to look at children who are long dead. But the same is true for archival photographs of zoo animals. What do you see when you look at this photograph? A grouping of children in Victorian dress on top of a very large elephant, with a man keeping the whole contraption at a standstill. From what can possibly be read of the expressions of children from a grainy photograph, they look expectant, excited—the child zoo feeling. The elephant’s expression is far more inscrutable. Exhausted, possibly. Or just present. So present that photographs of this famous elephant from history always emphasize how much its extremely mammoth body fills the entire frame, or has been herded into a small enclosure (in fact, anything large began to be called jumbo because of the dissemination of his absurdly large likeness in advertisements). Why does John Berger begin with a photograph of Jumbo the Elephant giving rides to children at the London Zoo? Perhaps to situate the Eurocentric nineteenth-century zoo attitude, a narrative of colonialism and alienation from labor (absent while present), a story of tragedy and absurdity, the only possible tonal registers for the history of capitalism. Here is a much clearer photograph than Berger opens with, and the expressions on the faces of the one female chaperone and the children, and the familiar male zookeeper, are far more squinted and uncertain, but it’s unclear whether that’s due to the extremely large animal they are astride or to the even-less-familiar performative moment of photography. Read More