“When I was a schoolboy my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals ‘THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT – UNEXPLORED.’” —…
The first time I picked up a cigarette, I was probably six years old. It was late morning, mid-summer, and the babysitter had let us kids out into the park next to her home while she returned inside to begin…
Either you learn to love baseball as a kid or else you don’t learn to love it. Right? It’s just too big. It’s like any other behemoth cultural institution—Catholicism, for example. I can speak to this as a Catholic. That…
Longtime Zephyr readers won’t need any introduction to Herb Ringer. His photography has appeared in this publication for nearly our entire existence. As a photographer, and a chronicler of the 20th century, he has always been right at the heart of…
When the swamp gas clears…and the weather balloons are safe in their weather-station beds …and all the super-secret spy planes have spun their alley-oops and jittered their non-ballistic shuffles through the clouds for the night…and you’re on some wide stretch…
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” – Robert Oppenheimer In any given week, any given month…
A BRIEF NEW INTRODUCTION by Jim Stiles Edward Abbey once said, “The idea of wilderness needs no defense.” Nor should anyone have to defend Abbey, or whatever his personal flaws might have been, thirty years after he died —especially in…