Outdoors Confessions

Here is a mildly disturbing, vastly entertaining series of pieces by Outside magazine writers who were asked to talk about their various preferred guilty pleasures. Among the less questionable is Ian Frazier’s article on the cheap thrill of watching things get eaten. “I know this minor outdoor pastime is not entirely healthy, but it scratches an itch, somehow. On a river I can get so absorbed in watching trout feed on mayflies that I forget to fish.” Frazier, by the way, contributed an excellent article to this week’s New Yorker magazine on the accelerating spread of wild hogs around the U.S. and the world.