Miso Soup Won’t Protect You in a Nuclear War

Shortly before the pandemic began, for reasons I’m faintly embarrassed to admit were as much recreational as professional, I attended an hour-long prepping workshop in Central Park. Shane Hoebel runs among the most visible wilderness survival schools close to New York City; for a few hundred bucks, he’ll take novices into the woods upstate for a weekend and teach them how to make a fire with flint and properly wield a knife. Hoebel once made a cameo in a New Yorker story, using Apache techniques to track down a panther that was said to be roaming celebrity neighborhoods upstate—which is to say he’s a theatrical guy, particularly well suited to stoking white-collar office workers’ latent desire to wield hatchets and imagine themselves escaping Manhattan before flames engulf the island. Read Full Article »