GRATING SPACE

I’ve launched a new blog along with photographer Akasha Rabut. It will document the blossoming of our new life in New Orleans. It’s called PEASANTS.

What follows is the third of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the first response, by Lee Wharf, as he sent it to me in an email.
(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)
Nate,
I’m [...]

On my first jaunt out into Cairo alone I made it relatively near to my destination after an only slightly awkward and opaque exchange with a cabbie. I didn’t really know where I was going, and wouldn’t have known exactly how to tell him if I had. I picked a big street near a big [...]

Total time spent on the Megabus between midnight Friday night and 10:30pm Sunday night: 20 hours
Total time spent in Lawrence, Kan., during that same time: 25.5 hours
My Megabus experience: great, save the theater dorks making noise next to me on the way back and the meaty smell of everyone’s sandwiches after we stopped at [...]

For the second installment of my infrequently installed series of posts about things my friends are up to that I think are cool, I present to you a surreal video my friend Ben helped produce for VBS (Vice TV) about a research facility outside of Knoxville, Tenn., where forensic scientists dump dead bodies and then [...]

Dear Melinda J. Nevarez,
The following is a letter of disclaimer I suggest you present to future guests to your home based on my experience of staying at your house last night. While I appreciate your hospitality immensely, something like this would have gone a long way toward making my stay more comfortable and enjoyable.
Yours,
Nathan [...]

The following originally appeared as part of a cross-promotion between STOP SMILING and Quimby’s Bookstore.

Quimby’s Bookstore is a haven for the literate eclectic. Comic book enthusiasts and fiction aficionados feel equally at home among the scattered racks and tables stacked high with printed guides to everything from radical poetry to political philosophy, craftivism handbooks to [...]

Do a Google search of my name: Nate Martin.
That’s the title of a term paper?
Be glad it’s not your name.

My friend Christian invited me to sail with him from New Zealand to Fiji next winter. By the time his boat is ready, his girlfriend will have joined him in the South Pacific, having saved enough money from working in a Wyoming oil field laboratory to sustain herself abroad. When I am an old man [...]

This article will appear in the upcoming Skeleton News.
Before I left to live in Buenos Aires I visited Chicago to meet with a cousin of a friend to discuss the prospect of obtaining employment at a school the cousin ran that certified people to teach at English-language institutes. This was December 2006. The cousin was [...]