The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.

Three are exactly 33 brave women and men who are part of the Investigative Services Branch, tasked with protecting our national parks.

I'm a sucker for learning how things are made, and this video certainly changed my impression of how ski lifts are installed.

Which, admittedly, made me realize that I even had an impression of of how ski lifts are installed.

Anyway, the ingenuity of this whole operation just made me smile. It made me think of Gus and Charlee working with those new Lego blocks at the Children's Museum last weekend. We humans really like building things, don't we?

This is an incredible piece of storytelling.

Professionally speaking, the use of parallax and "scrolljacking" generally irritates me. In this instance, the techniques are really well implemented and meaningfully improve the story's impact.

Personally speaking, the mental health struggles Alenka overcame are inspiring. Her zen-like approach to both free diving and life in general is one worthy of adapting.

Load this one on your laptop. I promise it'll be worth it.

In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long.

None of this, he said, is about ever running again for public office. “Elderly statesman” is how he describes his role now.

“When you leave office, you realize — well, I realized — that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said. “Just because I’m finished with this job that is only kind of a temporary job, does it mean that I have interest only in a temporary way? No! It’s like sports, with the follow-through.”

A tremendously well-written profile on one of my lifelong idols.

My hunch is that Arnold’s enduring popularity lies somewhere in the mixture of his incredible work ethic, his proclivity to address societal problems with “common sense”, his unique upbringing, his charismatic personality, and his boundless ambition.

Is Arnold perfect? Of course not. But he’s the voice that the right wing of politics deserves. Get back to focusing on solving problems, not winning at all costs.

Good decision makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good decisions make the future easier, giving you more time and less stress.

Many of my favorite Simpsons episodes of all time, including “Homer at the Bat” and “Bart Gets an Elephant”, were written by John Swartzwelder.

This article is a rare interview with a notoriously reclusive guy, and as someone who was practically raised at the altar of this show, getting a closer look at one of their disciples was a treat.

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Consider a man who leaves his menopausal wife and family to start a new family with a younger, fertile woman. Or think of certain high-status, married fathers who spend considerable time and money on girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes. Yet, many other men choose to forego these pursuits. They override impulses that evolution has programmed into their brains, impulses that evolved because they enhanced the reproductive success of their ancestors. They do so out of love and respect for their partners and their children, and out of respect for social and cultural norms. But how do they do what males of other species seem incapable of?

The answer, I believe, is that they rely on the crowning achievement of human brain evolution: the prefrontal cortex. Not only is the human brain three times larger than the brain of our closest living primate relatives, the great apes, but the human prefrontal cortex is also larger than expected for our brain size. Our prefrontal cortex is what allows us to override ancient, evolved impulses in the service of honouring commitments, abiding by social norms, and exercising our moral responsibilities. We are privileged to have this remarkable organ, and we fathers would all do well to make use of it.

I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

Hobbies are tough, especially hobbies that take up large chunks of a day (such as training for a marathon) or an actual entire day (such as getting season tickets to a sporting event).

I've got a few things that I'm thinking of getting into this year. First, tinkering with physical things. I am gonna try to restore some of my older broken tech that is laying dormant in my basement.

Second, flying. I want to get a discovery flight and possibly get my pilot's license.

Both of these things will take up "time", but frankly, after giving up most of my social media, I have a lot of free time in the evenings that gets eaten up with television. I'm ready to start trying some new things and being curious again.