Romance has fled from travel. Flight is humiliating. Frisked and stacked nearly upright, airline passengers are captive patrons of the world’s least appetizing snack bars. Who rides the bus? Subways have utilitarian charm, but little grace.

In America, if we want to travel with the last scraps of class, we’re left with the train. I’m on one right now: Amtrak’s Coast Starlight, which runs the western ridges from Seattle to San Diego.

It’s not fast. To get from Eugene, Oregon—my current wet home—to Petaluma, California, will take about 18 hours. That’s at least eight more than I’d need to travel by car and something like 14 more than it would take by plane, even with security screenings and travel to and from the airports.

But one doesn’t take the train for speed, at least not in America. You take the train for comfort. And despite the best efforts of my fellow train travelers, there’s still no more welcoming way to get around than by train.

Compared to the typical airline seat, even the coach-class seats on a train are miracles. I’m 6’4″—on some airlines I literally do not fit into economy seats—but here my knees have at least six inches to go before they would rest on the seat forward. If I push a knob that looks like the gear shift on an old riding lawnmower I can extend a leg support, which when added to the seat backs which can recline past 45 degrees, make it possible to sleep in relative comfort.

The attendants—I’m not sure what they’re called on the railways—provide pillows that approach normal size. That’s a miracle unto itself.

But you aren’t confined to your seat. A snack bar is open for several hours, complete with bottle of cheap wine and cans of beer. Entire sections of cars are dedicated to lounges, with diner-style booths or individual seats that face the bay windows. It would be beautiful if it weren’t night; the lines of the Coach Starlight enter territory so remote that there’s not a single light to be seen out either window of the train.

It’s a shame, then, that so many passengers have forgotten how to act in a shared space. Families crowd around expensive cans of beers in the lounge, bragging about how they have enough money to buy every can of beer on board, but that they simply choose not to.

I’m back on board at Gizmodo, sans title, but I think you could call me a “contributing editor” or some such. Check your local internet for details. I wrote this piece for The Awl, about New York and my ejaculatory experiences thereon. I was interviewed from the showfloor of CES by All Things Considered about [...]

In retrospect—a perch rising under with glacial immanence, pushing me further away from the hope I’d once had, as I gave up my city, my friends, what little that was secure in my life in the first place, tossed plans aside, only to see hope teased just a bit further away, then a bit more, [...]

…is my newfound love for The Turtles. They built a whole sequence around this song in the movie and even the addition of January Jones couldn’t save it. But the music nearly did.

What is it about slo-mo that makes things so funny?

As an accompanying piece to the “When Crocs Ruled” feature in the November issue of National Geographic, this artist’s rendering of the extinct “BoarCroc,” discovered in the Sahara by Paul Sereno and his team of researchers. It looks exactly like what most pulp fantasy fans would imagine as a stock-standard dragon. The camel case in [...]

…were awful. My apologies.

Whisky Magazine has an entire “Nosing Course” online for free, should you want to learn how to wank about whisky. (I do!) The image above is half of the “Whisky Wheel,” a graphic that helps you understand the terminology used when describing the taste and aroma of whiskies.

Director of BMW design Adrian van Hooydonk, I love you already. I know that we won’t see a car with this sort of shape for a while, but I can now starting dreaming of driving a sporty EV or hybrid in the future that doesn’t look like a Prius.

I offered to send my extra copy of Jonathan Coulton’s “Best. Concert. Ever.” CD and DVD to the person who could record the worst JoCo cover in 30-seconds. Here are the entrants and the winner. Gird your ears’ loins. Dan Beeston had already recorded his attempt to play “Skullcrusher Mountain” and sing at the same [...]