Author: Nathan Schiller
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A Diary of an Ultrarunning Life, Such That I Have One and This Is It
I always joked to myself that this blog would run its course when it turned into my running diary. If it’s no longer a joke, let’s get on with it. A brief note on web ephemera: blogs disappear not only when you stop posting but stop paying. Sites holding history merge, morph, migrate, sell. Integrations…
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Race Report: Mining For Vert Challenge
This race consisted of a 0.7673934-mile trail loop up and down the Silvermine Ski Hill, in Harriman State Park, put on wonderfully by CTW Endurance. You could do the two-hour or the four-hour option; I did the latter. (There was also a 7.488766-mile trail race.) The course Up one abandoned little ski slope— The loop starts…
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Race Report: Frosty Fat Sass
This race consisted of a 5K trail loop around the South Mountain Reservation, in New Jersey. It offered three options: I did the latter, so my race lasted from nine a.m. to three p.m. … ish. A few other things The race was self-supported; only water was provided. No problem—typical for a timed race in…
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The USMNT will win the World Cup: When and how
During a 2022 World Cup match early in the knockout round, a player was fouled and fell to the ground. The announcer John Strong asked his partner, the analyst Stu Holden, a former USMNT player with 25 caps, to explain the situation. Why the call, when the replay couldn’t confirm a bludgeoning? Did it really…
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Yunchan Lim and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto
Sometime before the pandemic I heard Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 live for the first time. The piece, known as the Rach 3, is among the most gargantuan in the standard repertoire, a vast structural complexity with knotty technicalities and tender souls. Long ago, I stretched my talent to learn its notes; I’ve probably encountered…
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The Last Dance and the myth of Michael Jordan
The Last Dance, a miniseries from two years ago, is ostensibly a 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls documentary. In reality it is an absurd, glossy, enthralling rendition of the myth of Michael Jordan. It’s like a casino, and Jordan’s the house. His career wasn’t so different. I am as susceptible as anyone, maybe more so because a) I…
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Vacations: Still good in a remote work environment
The blog is on vacation this month. Still, what would this blog be without brief thoughts on vacations? On second thought . . .
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Social media is too tidy
Following up on last month’s post about Twitter . . . The great hope and hype of the Internet is that it is the new frontier. Cyberspace was supposed to be Columbus’s India and California’s gold, a realm both beyond and inside the atmosphere. We never really explored the Internet The great letdown is that the social…
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Brief thoughts on Twitter, which everyone always talks about
The 1990s were a time when one could or could not be “into” computers. I was not particularly. I liked reading, writing, playing piano, playing sports, and hanging out with my friends. Computers made many of these things better, so I used them. As the Internet and the web evolved, they revealed a mysterious new…
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Parks of the Bronx: Van Cortlandt photo essay
Van Cortlandt Park, the third-largest in New York City, and one of the only three covering more than 1,000 acres, boasts the first public golf course in the USA, constructed in 1895. The park is also home to cricketers, who got ten full fields developed on the park’s old parade grounds in 2013. And it’s hallowed ground for high school…
Nathan Schiller 