Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

July 22, 2026

The Lemurians of Mount Shasta: A Visit to the Hidden Country

California’s mystic volcano has tenants no census has ever counted. An inquiry into where they live, how they live, why they live, and what happened when I went up to ask. Drive north out of Redding on Interstate 5 and the land begins rehearsing for something. The pines close ranks, the grade climbs, and then the forest opens and the mountain is simply there: fourteen thousand feet of snow and andesite standing alone above the valley floor, keeping no company on that horizon, rising nearly ten thousand feet above everything around it. Joaquin Miller saw it in the 1850s and gave it the sentence it has never escaped: “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” A mountain that looks like that collects tenants, and for a hundred years the most famous tenants of Mount Shasta have been a hidden people.

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October 15, 2010January 22, 2013

Organizing the Boles Blogs Network with the Paper Notebook Technique

Before there was the Boles Blogs Network, there was just Urban Semiotic and planning articles was simple. Either I was writing an article for Urban Semiotic or Go Inside Magazine — not too difficult. More blogs were added — three, here, four there, then three more — until the 13-blog strong Boles Blogs Network was created. Across the network, we cover all the niches of living. By the time we hit that magical number 13, I had a problem — no good way to keep up with knowing when I hadn’t written an article for a blog in a long while, and what I was planning on writing for any given blog.