PicoBlog

Welcome to the weekend! We continue our exploration of Door County, Wisconsin this week. Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter: Cover Story: The James Beard-nominated Wickman House in Ellison Bay has developed a devoted following. Owner Mike Holmes is now imagining what’s next in 2024. Weekend Reading List: shares her must-try South Carolina dishes, the best luggage for every kind of traveler, and more. Featured Destination: A Sister Bay shop with standout sandwiches.

I’m a “pencil and a lot of erasers” kind of girl - I don’t make decisions easily and then, when I do, I second and third guess them. I think we writers are like that. (Please tell me I’m not alone.) But I finally made a decision and it’s out in the world, so no erasing it now. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjaW70aKcoKqVmru0vMCnZqenpJp8pHmUbmlucWlugA%3D%3D

By Katie Sweeney In her first season as artistic director at San Francisco Ballet, Tamara Rojo has proven she is a force to be reckoned with — a creative pushing boundaries and heralding an era of firsts. One of these firsts was observed on April 4, with the opening of Dos Mujeres, a double bill featuring a new version of Carmen, and the North American premiere of Broken Wings, a ballet about Frida Kahlo.

When the Ukrainian civil war first erupted in 2014 — one side endorsed by the U.S. national security state, the other by the Kremlin — Barack Obama was a lonely voice of rationality and calm. “Obama Said to Resist Pressure from All Sides to Arm Ukraine” was a New York Times headline seven years ago: WASHINGTON — As American intelligence agencies have detected new Russian tanks and artillery crossing the border into Ukraine [in March 2015], President Obama is coming under increasing pressure from both parties and more officials inside his own government to send arms … But he remains unconvinced that they would help.

Almost no other hunt in North America triggers such an extreme reaction as does the annual September dove hunt. No animal I have hunted, and I’ve hunted swans and cranes and bunny rabbits, has elicited such a violently emotional response as has the dove. And it is the mourning dove in particular that critics get exercised about. We hunt four species of d… ncG1vNJzZmisn6m1pq7Op5xnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wsM6vnGagpaPBqrrGZpmapqNir6qzzq2cnWWglsC1

Back in January, I posted a five-minute snippet of an hour-long interview I conducted with Bonnie Raitt in February 2022 for the June 2022 issue of Stereophile magazine. Since the arc of Bonnie’s life is common knowledge, I chose to go not with a personal but, rather, a musical narrative: a 50-plus-year memoir in eight songs, from 1971’s “Big Road Blues,” by one of the Mississippi Delta’s Johnsons—Tommy, not Robert—to the new album’s “Waitin’ For You to Blow,” the unsparing self-examination of an individual (namely, most of us) in ever-present danger of backsliding into self-destructive habits.

I would be remiss to pass a Pride month without doing a bit of a deep dive on a tumblr meme. Tumblr was the hub for memes for LGBTQ teens in the early 2010s. A lot of people came to find community and learn fundamental things about their gender, sexuality, and personhood; and then make memes about those discoveries. I thought I would go semi deep into the vault and talk about something I’ve never talked about before: A Fake tumblr story.

At the edge of our woods, a shimmer of pale lavender caught my attention. It was a small patch of flowers that I had never seen before. At the top of each stem rose a tower of flower clusters, each coming straight up from the center of the one below, like the tiers of a pagoda. I took a flower to identify it. A book about native prairie plants gave me the name: Downy Wood Mint, Blephilia ciliata.

Dr. Christine Wilkinson is a conservation biologist, carnivore ecologist, and National Geographic Explorer, currently researching human-carnivore coexistence in the Lake Nakuru area of Kenya and in the urban spaces of California. She posts on TikTok as The Scrappy Naturalist, and her website is Scrappynaturalist.com. In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Yglesias’ words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.