The Loneliest Road in America “It’s totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they’re confident of their survival skills.” — Unnamed AAA Representative U.S. Route 50 stretches over 3,000 miles across the nation, from Sacramento, California, to Ocean City, Maryland. In July […]
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The Great North American Eclipse On 21 August 2017, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I sat in a baking parking lot at The Ohio State University. It was a Monday, and my wife had emerged from the Mathematics Tower to join me during a break between teaching classes. Wispy clouds hung in the sky but did
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A Rocky Remembrance written by Brianna S. The mountains were NOT calling. At least not to me. Each summer, I would see the shimmer in my brother’s eyes as we began preparations for our yearly trip to Maine. Even my father’s countenance, normally grumpy and stoic, would give off a gleeful hum –
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Nature FOMO As hard as it is to believe, the era of social media is already 20 years old. Life before (the)Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and MySpace seems a distant past. Two decades is more than enough to have shown us that the technology is a mixed bag. It has an undeniable allure and
Timeline of the Far Future This article features the first new content for this project after its fourth birthday. Anniversaries inherently elicit exercises in tense: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? I tried to envision what an episode of The Mountains Are Calling might look like in a year or five.
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Reduce Your Usage Without a doubt, plastics have revolutionized engineering, medicine, packaging, and numerous other milieu across the globe. The first human-made polymer is generally considered to be Parkesine, which was created by Alexander Parkes in 1855. Parkesine was composed of cellulose, a natural component of plant cell walls. By 1907, the first synthetic plastic
Skunk Runs I loathe running without a sporting objective. And, by sporting objective, I don’t mean setting a personal record in the mile or seeing how much distance I can cover before I drop. I can run all day if you add soccer, tennis, basketball, or another game. Without those goals, there are few things
The Beach Primeval Members of my family have spent holidays at the New Jersey shore for at least 70 years, likely longer. My mother and her siblings traveled with their elders to the boroughs of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park, which sit on a strip that locals call “the barrier island.” The Barnegat Peninsula, also
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The Abyss of Time “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” — John Playfair“We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” — James Hutton Perhaps no physical phenomenon befuddles the human mind as much as time. Whether the result of unknown properties or the inability
The Best Time of Year Every so often, one will encounter a popular, unending debate question: what’s your favorite season? I always had a tough time answering. As I pondered the query, a response would move to the tip of my tongue, but I would hesitate to vocalize. Yeah, I love the cooler temperatures and
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