Category Archives: Magazines

Tofu Bitch

Winter 2004

Last fall I was holed up in a big empty house on Cape Cod. It was the off season, and I was trying to have a writing retreat, but I was wasting it on the couch in front of the tube. I was in a stupor, glued to VH1—did I mention I was in a stupor?—when I stumbled across “Surviving Nugent,” a reality show in which half-a-dozen hapless “contestants” are sequestered on Ted Nugent’s ranch in Michigan. Their trials are outdoorsy things like running around in swamps and letting the Nuge verbally abuse them while he pretends to do a William Tell thing with an apple and an arrow.

It would all be in good fun, except for the Nuge’s little personality flaw: he derives gleeful pleasure from killing. His bloodlust is a revolting combination of bravado and heedless excess, and in “Surviving Nugent,” it translated into a running theme of animal torture. So why was I still watching? (more…)

Posted in Herbivore, Magazines

Leaving No Trace

Winter 2004

At the end of last summer, thirty thousand people gathered on the playa of Lake Lahontan, a dry Ice Age lakebed in Nevada’s Basin and Range. As we do each year, we brought enough food, water, and shelter to survive in the harsh and unpredictable Black Rock Desert for a week. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Orion

A Quiet Revolution: Organic Wines in California

Winter 2004

Along the byways of Mendocino County in the golden California sun, neat rows of Cabernet Sauvignon stretch towards impossibly picturesque mountains, never failing to create a perfect composition under the clean blue sky. Between the rows of vines is a riot of greenery: cover crops like radish and clover in place of the dry soil that once characterized this view. (more…)

Posted in Decanter, Magazines