Urban Organics Wants to Fix Food Download PDF

Inside a repurposed Twin Cities brewery, a massive aquaponics operation is ready to provide a locavore’s dream: fresh produce and fish, raised indoors every month of the year. 

On a cold, breezy morning in March 2017, I found myself shivering in a half-empty parking lot outside the entrance to the century-old Schmidt brewery in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The brick-walled landmark appeared abandoned. Beer hasn’t flowed through its industrial arteries since 2002, when brewing ceased permanently. Its whitewashed grain silos were yellowed and rust-stained; the chimney stack that once billowed fragrant, hops-scented steam had been capped. Continue reading →

Just Waive Goodbye Download PDF

With so many novice adventurers filing suit when something goes wrong, outfitters are shielding themselves behind increasingly dense liability forms. What does the mumbo jumbo really mean? We asked a crack team of lawyers.

THE TIME HAS COME. You’ve saved up for the adventure of a lifetime, and departure is imminent. But before you can raft the Grand Canyon, heli-ski Alaska’s Chugach Range, or climb Kilimanjaro, you need to get by a pesky gatekeeper: the liability-release waiver. If you’re like most clients, you’ll sign without reading a word. But you should know what you’re getting into. “It’s just like signing a mortgage,” says Tracey Knutson, an Anchorage-based attorney who represents outfitters from Alaska to Antarctica. “This is a binding contract.” More to the point, it’s a binding contract that leaves you powerless. Refuse to sign the waiver and you’ll be sent packing with a refund. If you sign, then get hurt and file suit ? Good luck—judge s toss out about 90 percent of recreation-based lawsuits.

This wasn’t always the case. “I recall many large outfits not using waivers in the early seventies,” says Reb Gregg, a Houston-based attorney who lectures about recreational liability. So how did things get so contentious? To find out, we constructed an abridged sample waiver using language from the contracts of a few leading outfitters, then dug up the lawsuits that prompted the bombproof legalese. The result is a look at 50 years of ski accidents, shark attacks, rafting mishaps, and negligent guides. Read on—then sign at your own risk. Continue reading →

Faster. Higher. Squeakier. Download PDF

In 2007, molecular biologist Ron Evans flipped a genetic switch on test mice and turned them into super-athletes. Headlines ensued, as did nervous references to human applications and ‘exercise in a pill.’ Evans is still toiling away in the lab, and guess what? The day is coming.

Back in the early 1960s, when the architect Louis Kahn designed the airy layout of the Salk Institute—a collection of stark concrete towers aligned like teetering dominoes on a Pacific Ocean bluff in La Jolla, California—he oriented the buildings so that robust sea breezes would waft through the upper floors. But as I descend four flights of stairs to enter a sprawling subterranean lab, the sweet ocean air turns sour. Researchers at Salk are conducting cutting-edge experiments in genetics, biology, neuroscience, and human physiology. At the core of this futuristic work are 6,000 old-fashioned, defecating rodents, stacked in shoebox-size plastic cages, creating an odor far too potent for Kahn’s ingenious ventilation scheme to handle.

Despite the funk, the facility is meticulous. Wearing powder-blue scrubs, a surgical mask, a bouffant cap, and cloth shoe covers, I enter through a sterile clean room closed off between double doors. A whitewashed hallway adjoins various smaller labs, where mice are being injected with performance-enhancing compounds and forced to sprint on tiny treadmills. Others have had bits of their DNA reprogrammed to make them better runners. There are paunchy mice gorging on high-fat diets and svelte mice getting low-cal meals. Hunched over a metal table, a technician sorts through a squirming posse, plucking out prime studs for breeding and banishing aggressive males to solitary confinement. Mice are sacrificed and their muscles examined. Blood is sampled, hearts are inspected, kidneys and livers prodded. Continue reading →

Chasing the Bull Download PDF

Sailing a fully stocked 57-foot catamaran, kitesurfer and entrepreneur Gavin McClurg sets out to find and tame the big a strapping winds in Panama’s Bocas Del Toro.

I’m not a sailor, but I’m pretty sure that attempting to thread a 57-foot sailing yacht through a shoulder-deep, mangrove-choked estuary isn’t prudent seamanship. We entered this maze of islets 20 minutes ago on Discovery, a Lagoon 570 catamaran, motoring on twin diesels, and so far we haven’t run aground. But I keep glimpsing stacks of billowy black coral inches below the surface of the crystalline flatwater. Captaining the ship is 36-year-old Gavin McClurg, a slight-framed boatman who has spent the past decade ocean-hopping. He purchased Discovery in Italy on December 22, 2006, and less than 12 hours later sailed her 5,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. “No tools, no bedding, no spares, no nothing,” he says. When we set sail earlier in the day from a sleepy marina in Panama to commence a weeklong expedition through the Bocas del Toro archipelago, McClurg had only a crude itinerary and just one goal: to find good wind. McClurg, along with his two dozen passengers, hopes to become the first to kitesurf in these remote islands. At the moment, however, McClurg is darting from his vantage point on the starboard stern to Discovery’s saloon, where he checks a map on his laptop. His girlfriend and first mate, Jody MacDonald, 33, is standing on the boom, watching for hazards from her 14-foot perch.

“Reeeeeeeeeeeef!” she screams. MacDonald unwinds by BASE jumping, so her panic is alarming. “What does the chart say?” Continue reading →

The Zero-G Spot Download PDF

Michael Behar has a simple fantasy: to be the first man on the planet to join the 100-mile-high club. But as he discovers in his hot pursuit of the big bang, he’s hardly alone. In fact, cosmic copulation has become the hottest craze since the Kama Sutra.

A couple of months ago, I was late-night channel-surfing and caught the tail end of Moonraker, the campy old James Bond flick in which Agent 007 both saves the world and enjoys zero-gravity sex with Dr. Holly Goodhead. (Nice day at the office.) As they embraced in a free-floating tumble, I realized something very important: I wanna do that.

You see, I have always been a space geek. So having sex above the stratosphere has long been on my list of adventure goals. But until recently, all I could do was dream. These days—thanks to the burgeoning space-tourism industry—the concept of the 100-mile-high club is starting to seem seriously feasible. Continue reading →

Windsurfing Has Been Canceled Download PDF

So say Matt Nuzzo and Trip Forman, the founders of Real Kiteboarding, who are channeling Jake Burton and trying to turn their breezy passion into the next action-sport phenomenon. Michael Behar joins the believers on a rum-soaked Caribbean cruise to find out: Is kiteboarding the new snowboardoing?

I’m about to go for the ride of my life. It’s February, and I’ve been in the British Virgin Islands for five days with Trip Forman and Matt Nuzzo, founders of the Cape Hatteras, North Carolina-based Real Kiteboarding. The duo has recently teamed up with charter-yacht juggernaut the Moorings to offer a weeklong kiteboarding cruise in the BVIs. Their first official trip will be in December, but I’m on their shakedown sail, an informal preview that’s part scouting mission, part Faustian flotilla. Within these hundreds of miles of Caribbean perfection—where warm and consistent trade winds swirl across deserted beaches and secluded bays—our aim is simple: Eat like royalty, drink like rock stars, and kite our asses off. Continue reading →

A New Shining Path Download PDF

While thousands of trekkers swarm the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu’s Salcantay Route offers better views, deluxe digs, and splendid isolation.”

It’s early may and I’m trekking to Machu Picchu with Enrique Umbert, a 57-year-old Peruvian commodities trader who just confessed to me that his passion for the Andes “is like a love affair with a beautiful woman.” I can see the attraction: Directly in front of us are Humantay and Salcantay, dueling ice-clad peaks, 19,412 and 20,574 feet tall, respectively. Gravity-defying glaciers cling to their summits, and every so often a tractor-size slab of ice calves off and triggers a thundering avalanche into a distant ravine. The twin massifs frame a radiant half-mile-wide meadow called Soraypampa, our campsite for the night and the starting point of the spectacular 30-mile Inca path called the Salcantay Route, a little-known, backdoor way to Machu Picchu. Continue reading →

The Believers Download PDF

The future doesn’t just happen. The next frontiers of adventure, fitness, gear, and sport are crafted by bold visionaries with world-changing dreams—and the minds and muscles to make them real. Behold the 25 all-star innovators leading us beyond tomorrow.

Fabien Cousteau: Underwater Auteur Fabien Cousteau is sunburned. It’s a sultry August evening in Key Largo, Florida, and the 38-year-old grandson of history’s preeminent undersea explorer arrives late for dinner, having just wrapped up a 13-hour day filming coral spawning. He walks across the parking lot of the Italian bistro and extends his hand to shake mine. His wispy brown hair is flecked with gray, a striking contrast to his crimson face. “I’m Fabien,” he says. “I’ll be right back.” With that, he darts across the blacktop highway in his flip-flops and into a CVS pharmacy. Five minutes later, he returns clutching a jumbo bottle of aloe vera gel. Continue reading →