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Distant Greens
Distant Greens travels to the highest golf course in the world, where breathless Tibetan precepts come face to face with the oxymoron of Indian military intelligence. To a golf course in the Amazon rainforest, near the source of rubber, which revolutionized the game. To the Middle Kingdom, to examine claims that it was the Chinese, and not the Scots, who invented golf. And to a volcanic Indonesian course where the Mermaid Queen ensures that “her” sultan always has good weather when he plays.
Distant Greens also travels into the soul of golf, the rituals, the belief that a tetrachaidecohedron-dimple-pattern can make a difference. Why can throwing junk-shop 4-irons provide an insight into the soul? What does a Zen priest in Japan hope to teach his acolyte golfers? Why do people cheat? Why do golfers remember the bad shots instead of the good shots? And why is golf more important, to some folks, than sex?
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Featured Articles
Need/Fear Relationship with Nature
July 24, 2025 — Earth Overshoot Day Earth Overshoot Day recognizes the date each year when humanity will have used up nature’s entire annual budget of ecological resources and services. The Global Footprint Network and York University (UK), developers of Earth Overshoot Day, have calculated that “humanity is using nature 80% faster […]
News & Events
Intro to a speculative biography of Ali
Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird Intro to a speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant in the Malay Archipelago Consider Alfred Russel Wallace’s iconic hero’s journeys, exceptional even by the standards of other intrepid 19th-century British explorers. In 1848, Wallace and his friend Herbert Walter Bates said, in […]
Alfred Russel Wallace and Things That Go Bump in the Night
Alfred Russel Wallace is best known for his scientific achievements — collecting and documenting hundreds of new species of “natural productions,” major insights into biogeography, island endemism, and cultural anthropology, and notably, his development of a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of and prior to that of Charles Darwin. But Wallace was also […]
Enhancing the Narrative
A historian quickly learns there is little absolute truth. The authors of personal memoirs and observer narratives enhance, misremember (sometimes deliberately), censor, and leave out chunks of information.
Rarely, though, do historians try to go beyond the facts and speculate on the emotions, intentions, and psychological motivations of their research subjects.
As a fun exercise, I’ve created several “imagined conversations” between Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, based on tidbits of information and provocative clues found in Wallace’s narratives.