Author: Kristy Guy

Paddle Board Recommendations

I love stand up paddle boarding. I go as often as I can during the seemingly endless days of summer and checked off a bucket list item last year when I planned and competed a SUP camping trip (like kayak camping, but with a paddle board). Recently-ish, a friend asked me which kind of board they should get and I wrote such a long response, I figured I should turn it into a post. Voila!

What I don’t like about inflatable paddle boards:

Inflatables don’t cut through the water as efficiently as hard (foam or fiberglass) boards, and they stand higher in the water, so they skate a bit more. That said, they’re just as sturdy. It’s not like you’re trying to paddle on a pool float. They’re very rigid (if properly inflated).

What I like about inflatables:

The ease. Once inflated, inflatable boards are just easier to move. They’re lighter. They’re less likely to be damaged if you drop it or bump into something. They’re also less likely to damage anything you bump into with it (like, your car). If you don’t want to fully deflate it, you can let out enough air to cram it in your trunk. (Saves future you some time on re-inflating if you didn’t spring for a motorized pump.) Take them on road trips because you don’t have to worry about the added wind resistance (and thus lower milage) from having a board on top of your car. Wins all around!

What I don’t like about hard boards:

Hard boards are a pain to move. They have to be tied down to the top of your car, which means getting an 10+ ft board on top of your car in the first place. The taller your car, the harder this is. Especially if you’re flying solo. You can transport it in a bag on top of your car (the bag will flap loudly and incessantly once you reach highway speeds) or sans bag (now your board is susceptible to rocks and general debris dinging it). Once you get to your paddling location, you probably can’t park right next to the water (if you can, please tell me where you’re going, I want to go there). Now you have to finagle the board off the top of your car without damaging your board or your car and then you get to carry your board to the water. There are little dollies you can use to make the trip from the car to the water easier. Personally, that’s just more stuff and I want as few loose items to wrangle as possible. Don’t forget you’ll have a paddle to carry as well.

Hard boards are also a pain to store. If you don’t have a garage, you’ll need a bag or protective layer of some sort to protect your board from the elements. I didn’t start using my hard board regularly until I was able to store it at a marina. Now I can just toss it into the water and go.

What I like about hard boards:

My epoxy board cuts through the water better than any inflatable or foam board I’ve used. It’s more efficient and feels like I’m gliding over the water with half the effort. Plus, it’s just really pretty.

Read: He loves to live in the worlds his kids create

I was reading this piece about how one dad found parenting inspiration in a character from a kids’ cartoon and I was knocked flat by the simple beauty of these words:

He loves his children. And more than that … he loves to live in the worlds they create.

Bryan Walsh for Vox

In raising my sister and me, my parents chose to take our curiosity seriously. They welcomed our questions and encouraged deliberation, even though I’m sure it was annoying at times and downright cumbersome at others. Yet they never dismissed questions like “why is the sky blue” or “how many bricks are in that wall?” They took the time to engage with us as we were learning how to think about the world. I’ve only just started to understand in the last few years how rare and special that was.

Read: Why Very Rich People Want to Buy Chelsea FC So Badly

I love inside baseball and this article on why someone would want to buy Chelsea FC (currently owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch) was a fun and fascinating read. Favorite quote:

“That the Rickettses managed to become the villains of this story, given who they tried to buy the club from at this geopolitical moment, is a captivating achievement on the part of the family.”

Alex Kirshner for Slate

Rabbit Hole: Avalanches

This one’s grim. 

When I first started skiing, I had jacket with a kind of beacon-lite technology for location purposes, like in the event of an avalanche. I wasn’t too worried. I’d seen the cute pictures of search and rescue dogs unburying their smiling handlers during training sessions. I assumed I would survive a small avalanche and that most people did. I was wrong. 

The odds of surviving an avalanche are pretty abysmal. If you’re lucky enough to not get buried alive (most that do die of asphyxiation), it’s unlikely you’ll survive the body trauma inflicted by the wall of ice chunks and accumulated debris swirling around you at highway speeds.

I had avalanches on the brain after remembering an interview I’d read a while back with Jill Fredston, who performed avalanche search and rescue for years before calling it quits. The whole interview is fascinating (Fredston just seems like a fascinating person all around), but this is the part that has been etched in my brain since I first read it:

“[As my partner and I] become more comfortable with hazard … we realized that it was going to take a much smaller mistake for us to get into trouble. So we’ve made a pretty conscious effort to step back. We don’t push ourselves to the full range of our skills so that we’re trying to allow a greater margin for error, because, to some extent, if you do something for 10, 20, or 30 years, you’re up against the law of probability. One of the reasons I hated being called an avalanche expert is that the avalanches don’t know you’re an expert. And the fact that you’ve done it for 10, 20, or 30 years doesn’t mean that you can’t make an error in judgment.”

Jill Fredston as told to David Epstein for Slate

I was blown away by the realization that mastery in a given area wouldn’t result in a higher comfort with risk. I really appreciated her distinction between comfort with hazard and overall risk tolerance. Rereading the article, I was also struck by this great observation:

We’re a very fickle society when it comes to risk because we celebrate it when it succeeds and we denigrate it when it doesn’t

Jill Fredston as told to David Epstein for Slate

After mentioning this interview to a friend, I went in search of it and was mildly devastated when I could not find it anywhere. Eventually I did find it, but not before stumbling upon this truly stunning six-part series by John Branch for The New York Times. (Thanks to the quoted search engine gods for sending me down this path.) Snow Fall is about a group of professional skiers that got swept up in a deadly avalanche at Steven’s Pass. It is a phenomenally reported piece. If I were telling you this in person, I would drag out “phenomenally” and maybe (probably) even place my hands on the table for full emphatic effect. Branch spent six months on it and the attention to detail shows. More importantly, so does his empathy for the story’s subjects. It’s a tragic tale that is handled with care and clear consideration for everyone involved.

The series is also extremely educational, with lots of informative graphics that really help to encapsulate the magnitude of what the skiers experienced. The New York Times has been experimenting with visual elements in their long form reporting over the last few years and I would say this was one of, if not the best use of video alongside text.

She had no control of her body as she tumbled downhill. She did not know up from down. It was not unlike being cartwheeled in a relentlessly crashing wave. But snow does not recede. It swallows its victims. It does not spit them out.

John Branch for The New York Times

Because this is a proper rabbit hole, we’re not stopping at two articles (or is it actually seven? You be the judge). In my internet hunting hysteria, I came across another avalanche story I’d read in the past year, this one a spooky tale made possibly less spooky by science. I’d never heard of the Dyatlov Pass incident before reading this.

When a search team arrived at Kholat Saykhl a few weeks later, the expedition tent was found just barely sticking out of the snow, and it appeared cut open from the inside. The next day, the first of the bodies was found near a cedar tree. Over the next few months, as the snow thawed, search teams gradually uncovered more spine-chilling sights: All nine of the team members’ bodies were scattered around the mountain’s slope, some in a baffling state of undress; some of their skulls and chests had been smashed open; others had eyes missing, and one lacked a tongue.

Robin George Andrews for National Geographic

The new/old theory is that an avalanche pummeled the sleeping team. The possibility of an avalanche had been considered previously and then dismissed, however new modeling tools (built for the movie Frozen, yes THAT Frozen) demonstrated how one could’ve occurred in an area not known for avalanches. This theory is not popular. As the article put it, “People don’t want it to be an avalanche … It’s too normal.” Personally, I like it because of the normalcy. A series of unfortunate choices that seemed fine at the time (cutting into a slope for wind protection, placing skis under the sleeping bags for added warmth) resulted in a dismal domino effect (human triggered avalanche, rigidity of the skis beneath them increased the blunt force of the cascading snow). It fits within the small margin of error that Fredstone alluded to.

—

I think the “cut from the inside” bit really grabbed me because it felt narratively similar to Tana French’s In The Woods, where the main character is found as a kid wearing sneakers soaked with blood (not his) from the inside out. That mystery remains, frustratingly, unsolved.

Listen: Maintenance Phase, Episode: Jordan Peterson Part 1

I am a superfan of Michael Hobbes, cohost of Maintenance Phase (with Aubrey Gorman). Maintenance Phase uses the same format deployed in his first podcast (You’re Wrong About cohosted with Sarah Marshall) where one of the hosts tells the other about a topic they researched. Structurally, it works so well. The host who’s coming in cold on the topic serves as the audience proxy and there’s a clear conversational driver. I’m not a big fan of the “aimless conversation between friends” genre of podcasting, but I love dropping in on structured conversations between two smart people who like and respect each other. Especially when it’s a man and a woman taking turns listening to each other. (Sarah once said in a You’re Wrong About bonus episode that this was something that she loved about cohosting the show with Michael and I’ve never forgotten it.)

Maintenance Phase is primarily about the junk science behind fad diets and the toxicity of the weight loss industry, but this episode had an unexpected through line about personal narrative, a topic that’s really interesting and important to me. I believe storytelling is the most powerful force in our lives, collectively and individually. It was fun to hear that reiterated through the lens of dietary choices, of all things.

I also loved this quote below from the Atlantic article that was referenced in the episode:

The beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are modulated by our lifestyles—from how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress, which tends to be a by-product of a perceived lack of control or order.

James Hamblin for The Atlantic

Amazing how our perception of the world impacts our experience of the world. If you don’t want to listen to the whole episode (which I think would be a mistake, but you do you), the narrative convos happen at 17:17 and 53:10.

Watch: Emma

I fell in a Constance Grady rabbit hole last week (as one does and if one hasn’t, they should, with this as required reading). While going through her page, I realized I’d missed her review of the latest Jane Austen adaptation when it first ran. For reasons that were admittedly prurient, I immediately sank my teeth into Why Autumn de Wilde’s new Emma movie is so horny. Throughly convinced of its cinematic import, I decided to watch the movie and was so glad I did. I found it wheezingly funny and Bill Nighy as the hilariously quirky Mr. Woodhouse was just delightful. Highly recommend for lovers of the Jane Austen universe and/or of British humor. And if after watching, you were to fall into an Emma rabbit hole this was a fun read as well.

Read: Shiv’s Costuming In Succession

I don’t watch Succession, but I loved this drive by analysis of the costuming.