Ellis Barstow, the protagonist in Nick Arvin's most recent novel, is a reconstructionist—an engineer who uses forensic analysis and simulation to piece together, in ...

The largest collection of wild yeasts in the world fits inside a single beige chest freezer, humming quietly at the back of a busy lab in the University of...

On a brief detour on our way to visit Carlsbad, New Mexico, Venue swung through the northwest extremity of Texas, within shooting distance of the 10,000 Year...

Between 1897 and 1930, Henry Chapman Mercer, a gentleman anthropologist, set out to collect the handmade tools of everyday American life, just as industrialization...

Upon first reading about it, Thomas Jefferson's house at Monticello–a structure he himself designed and that he filled with strange devices, such as

On what was to be, sadly, Venue's only stop in Oregon, we went off-road to visit the world's largest organism, a colossal fungus in the remote eastern mountains of...

Inspired by our conversation with Penelope Boston, in which she described to Venue the possibility of extraordinarily ancient lava tubes on Mars (and even the...

There is not a whole lot to say about the Hollow Mountain gas station, other than that Venue arrived in Hanksville, Utah, simply as a stopping off point to get some...

A landscape painting above Penny Boston's living room entryway depicts astronauts exploring Mars. Penelope Boston is a speleo-biologist at New Mexico Tech, where...

While staying in Moab, Utah, and after interviewing Vicki Webster of the U.S. National Park Service, Venue received a dinner invitation on Twitter from a small...

In what would turn out to be, in retrospect, the northernmost stop on the 16-month Venue itinerary, we drove into the iron ranges and boreal forests of...

There are only half a dozen radon health mines in the United States, and all six of them are located within twenty minutes' drive of each other in western...

While passing through Wisconsin, Venue made sure to hike part of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. The trail both marks and follows the outer edge of the huge...

Venue took a detour north into the periphery of greater Los Angeles to drive across, through, and back again over the San Andreas Fault, a slow motion crash...

On the drive from Cape Canaveral to Miami, Venue stopped off in Fort Pierce to fortify ourselves with a gator tail sandwich, when we serendipitously happened...

Gated “Monaco” Lake Las Vegas Homesites Looking West on Grand Corniche Drive, Bankrupt MonteLago Village and Ponte Vecchio Bridge Beyond, Henderson, Nevada (20...

The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado...

Geoff Manaugh and Folkert Gorter at Superfamous HQ. At the risk of seeming recursive, Venue stopped by Superfamous, the Los Angeles-based design studio behind...

"Gradually, America's management of its wild animals has evolved, or maybe devolved, into a surreal kind of performance art," reflects Jon Mooallem, author of Wild...

Looming over and behind the town of Butte, Montana, is the extraordinary sight of an abandoned copper mine called the Berkeley Pit. Like something from a...

On our way west across Arizona, Venue read about—and made a spur of the moment detour for—Grand Canyon Caverns, a once-landmark tourist site found just off his...

Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource. East of the Mississippi, it is already extinct; even in the West, night sky connoisseurs admit...

An hour's drive east-southeast of Pittsburgh, hidden among the picturebook-perfect red barns, white fences, and green fields of the Lignonier Valley, lies an...

Fort Irwin is a U.S. army base nearly the size of Rhode Island, located in the Mojave Desert about an hour's drive northeast of Barstow, California. There you...

Arriving much earlier than expected for our tour of Fort Irwin, detailed in another post, Venue spent a half-hour wandering around the so-called Painted Rocks,...

Screenshot of our own SimCity (called, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignons) after three hours of game play. In the nearly...

Water Pipe, Running from Central Arizona Project to Pleasant Valley Development, Phoenix, Arizona (2009). Photograph by Peter Arnold, originally published on...

Photo courtesy Scott McGuire. Several years ago, when half of Venue worked on the editorial staff at Dwell magazine, we took a daytrip down to the head office of...

Mike Elizalde of Spectral Motion applies make-up to actor Ron Perlman, as Hellboy. Many of today's most original and bizarre visions of alternative worlds and...

Venue took a long afternoon detour south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to hike the surreal geological formations of the all but unknown Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks...

On a visit delayed by a long stretch of rain the day before, Venue drove east from downtown Los Angeles to visit the Puente Hills landfill—the nation's largest a...

On a hot afternoon in Moab, Utah, Venue stopped by the museum collection storage facility for the Southeast Utah Group of National Parks, to visit a small...

The Hayward Fault runs through the center of the UC Berkeley campus, famously splitting the university's football stadium in half from end to end. It has, according...

On a tip from Nick Blomstrand, one of the students from Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, with whom Venue had the pleasure of traveling through...

Kazakhstan Elite, Jessica Rath, high-­fire glazed porcelain, 2012; photograph courtesy Jessica Rath. Every apple for sale at your local supermarket is a ...

While in Denver, Colorado, Venue had the pleasure of making a childhood fantasy come true: an all-day backstage pass to the city's public library, complete with...

When European farmers arrived in North America, they claimed it with fences. Fences were the physical manifestation of a belief in private ownership and the...

Taking a cue from the provocative approach of historian Annette Kolodny—who suggests in her recent book In Search of First Contact that Algonquin pictographs a...

Dennis Scholl is a former accountant and sometime casino card-counter turned Emmy-award winning documentary producer, as well as a boutique winemaker who now...

Some of the most fascinating, unsettling examples of landscape painting in the contemporary United States are to be found in its prison visiting rooms, where they...