According to a report by the Los Angeles Times and subsequent news sources, California ski accidents are up nearly 50 percent over the last two years, statistics that news reports have attributed to a rise in GoPro use, selfie stops, and “THC-laced gummies.” That’s quite the cocktail, and one interviewee mentioned that chairlifts often “smell like skunks when they should...

　　“The easiest way to turn your kids into geniuses by the time they’re seven is to front load huge amounts of experience, including dangerous experience.” This is the advice of the late John Taylor Gatto, the writer and educator who is perhaps best known for his passionate polemics against compulsory schooling. For Gatto, one of the ominous signs of  “well-schooled...

There's a lot to be said for winter climbing - we wouldn't put ourselves through it for nothing. Yet it does seem a perverse, self-punishing sort of activity. I often wonder about the way the axe-wielding brigade so willingly seek out the coldest, shadiest crannies to suffer in. Yes of course, that's where the conditions are. But how often have...

　　Last spring, among the usual elementary school reminders about theme weeks and illicit peanut butter snacks (WE ARE A NUT FREE CAMPUS!!) an email popped up that gave me pause. My kindergartner would be weighed in school, it said, and I could click on a link to opt her out. 　　It gave me the ick. I’d paid attention to young women...

These days articles are often oriented around click bait, with publishers and media outlets frequently focussing on 'top five' this and 'top ten' that. As a result of this we thought we'd buck the trend and do something completely different, by taking a theme that has absolute no relevance to anyone and rolling with it. Unfortunately one issue with this...

　　Hundreds of Ford Trail Transit owners may need to get their vehicles fixed, according to a recall issued last week. 　　Nearly 2,000 of the Ford vans are subject to the recall, which the company announced on March 22 after several owners reported a weird noise. The problem, it turns out, was about tires rubbing against the wheel wells. 　　Ford Transit...

　　When Jeff Potter arrived in Carson City, Nevada near the end of the ’90s, he noted an absence: His new home was ringed by low-slung mountains at the eastern edge of the towering Sierra Nevada and its sweeping Lake Tahoe, but there was no real way to get to them without a car. 　　A California native drawn toward Tahoe for...