Marfa 2025
by Anton Zuiker on August 4, 2025
Broken, 2020-2025, by Katherine Shaughnessy
Erin’s sister, Katherine Shaughnessy, is an artist living in Boise, Idaho, where she makes her art and runs the Common Well, a “creative league and co-working club.”
Katherine and her Common Well partner, with support from the Alexa Rose Foundation, had organized House on Fire, a residency for a group of Idaho artists so they could visit the art mecca of Marfa, Texas. As part of the tour, Katherine would be unveiling a new piece of art that we’ve known her to be working on for years.
In Cleveland last week, Erin and I decided we should get to Marfa to surprise Katherine and to be there to celebrate her vision. We’d last been in Marfa ten years ago—that trip was during my blogging and social media sabbatical, so there’s not much for me to link to except this post, but it was an important stage in my refocusing on my health and my family—and I was happy to have a reason to get back.
So, we flew to El Paso the night before the residency’s opening dinner; we worked in the morning from our hotel, got lunch at Taconeta, and then drove into the wide open desert of West Texas.
We arrived in Marfa just in time to quickly set up in our Airbnb lodging at BOHEMIO Marfa and get dressed up in clean shirts and our boots, then get to the Capri special event space (across from the Thunderbird Hotel, with which it used to be partnered) just as Katherine was walking through the door into the courtyard. After whoops of happiness and hugs all around, we joined the House on Fire group for cocktails in the bar, borderlands music by local musician Primo Arrasco and his friends under the arbor, and a delicious long-table dinner by chef Jocelyn Jerrils (I had about six servings of the delicious tomato and tomatillo salad with chincharron crumbs, charred scallion, and yogurt). At 8 p.m., the big doors came up for a free showing of the Idaho artist’s work, open to the entire community, in the stunning Capri space (check it out online to see how it’s used a few times a year for destination weddings).
For the next two days, we joined Katherine as she led the group on a busy schedule of visits to art galleries and artist studios, including a stunning exhibit of Christopher Wool’s art in a giant gallery, a curator’s tour of Ballroom Marfa and its current exhibit, Los Encuentros, and a walk with Julie Speed through her studio in a former jail that overlooks the Donal Judd sculptures at the Chinati Foundation (the group toured that before we arrived).
The river
And the highlight of the weekend, for me, was Katherine’s unveiling of two new works of her own inside the empty Do Right Hall (a former church owned by her good friends Camp and Buck, who also own the Wrong store in town, a great place to buy art and jewelry): Broken, a series of 308 birch panels, each 8 inches by 8 inches and representing approximately nine square miles of land along the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, and also Complementary, a textile she’d woven from the threads of U.S.A. and Mexico flags.
Back in 2020, when Anna and I had visited her in Boise, Katherine had shown us the first of the panels of her new project. And the last time I was in Marfa, Katherine had organized a day trip for our families to raft the river in Big Bend State Park.
So, standing in front of the finished work, I felt awed by Katherine’s vision, her artistry, her scale and scope. Watch Katherine’s timelapse reel showing the installation of Broken.
Food and drink
That first night, there were a couple of Spicy Oaxaca cocktails: mezcal, serrano agave, lime, and cempa sal on the rim.
On our final night, the artists on their way home to Idaho, we returned to Cochineal for dinner with Katherine and her husband, Tom Michael, along with University of New Hampshire journalism professor Tom Haines and Kelly Close, a relative of Erin and Katherine. Tom Michael was the founder and first station manager of Marfa Public Radio and currently is manager of Boise Public Radio and like half of America he was reeling from the news of the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Kelly was in from San Francisco, where we’d visited her last fall, and would soon be off to Washington to advocate for people with diabetes. Tom Haines was planning his return to UNH after a year-long sabbatical in Marfa.
We all went for the chef’s menu at Cochineal, which that night featured tartare of Nilgai (an introduced antelope that escaped and is now wild in west Texas), fried but moist quail with mesquite honey, a single grilled Texas gulf shrimp in a pool of corn chowder (the table favorite), terrine of wild boar, tender grilled bison, and banana pudding. I enjoyed a Paloma fumeé made with mezcal.
Since we were so close to Mexico—the U.S. Border Control has a regional hub in Marfa with a yard full of white-and-green trucks; we had to pass through one checkpoint on the interstate outside of El Paso—I hoped to get a good bottle of the spirit, and it turns out Cactus Liquors in Marfa has an excellent collection of tequila, mezcal, and sotol. I’ve come home with two bottles of mezcal (one that I sampled in Julie Speed’s studio) and a bottle of sotol.
Marfa is small. Marfa is art. Marfa is peaceful. Marfa is most fun with family and friends to guide you. So glad we went.
The House on Fire artists
Extras
- We were at Capri until late, so I missed singer Kate Short at nearby Planet Marfa.
- See Julie Speed’s Instagram post with the Idaho artists.
- For lunch one day, we picked up delicious sandwiches from the Italian deli Bordo and took them back to BOHEMIO.
- On its website, Ballroom Marfa uses an open-source font called Marfa.
- At other stores in town, I also got myself a Stetson Open Road straw hat and ordered a pair of cowboy boots.
- Over on Wan Smol Blog, I posted photos and lists of the wildlife I saw on the trip, including one roadrunner and a nocturnal kit fox.
Union Market
by Anton Zuiker on July 28, 2025
Last week I was back in Washington, D.C. for a couple of work meetings. Malia was busy in her part of the district (near American University) so I decided to pick a hotel in the Union Market area in order to explore the shopping and dining and entertainment options nearby.
One hot afternoon I stopped into the cool—air temp and music vibe—Byrdland Records, where I purchased the new album by Wet Leg (check out that retro website). Then I grabbed a late lunch in the Union Market and a delicious, sweet Sticky Rice mango-and-coconut-infused Berliner Weisse at Crooked Run Fermentation. The next day, Anna also had arrived in the city and she joined me back at the market and brewery before she hopped the Metro to join Malia for the night.
I also caught live music both nights, first to see the Detroit band Chirp at Songbyrd, with the local jam-band Dead Fish (really liked their energy and riffs) and the next night the Toronto-based Ducks Ltd. in the sold-out upstairs club DC9.
After my morning meeting in Bethesda, Anna and Malia and I were driving to Cleveland to join up with the rest of the family. We stopped outside of Pittsburgh at the Boyd & Blair distillery so I could snag an order of the professional 151 vodka that I’ll use to make another batch of Amaro Cucciolo, following this recipe that appeared in the Washington Post in 2013; I’ve been trying since then to get the high-proof vodka from Boyd & Blair, but this is the first time I could get to the distillery.
In Cleveland, fun times with family, including a few hours on Lake Erie on Michael’s boat, the kids bouncing behind on the tube. I jumped in and floated in the cold water, but sweated through the hot evenings in the upstairs bedroom. To escape the heat, and the noisy house, I spent a part of one work day at the nice Icon Cowork space in Lakewood. Another morning, I met my friend Joe for coffee at Five Points Coffee & Tea back in the West Park neighborhood that is home to the Shaughnessy family.
Home again, but more travel beckons.
10 days in Ireland
by Anton Zuiker on July 6, 2025
Dublin's Samuel Beckett Bridge, lit up for Pride Parade
In June, Erin and I enjoyed a grand vacation in Ireland, eating and drinking, walking and talking, listening and learning, even cheering with the local supporters at a football match. I want to go back.
I was delayed in writing about the vacation because, on the plane coming home, I sat next to a sneezing 11-year-old girl and in front of a coughing older man. (Erin was in a more comfortable section of the plane.) By the end of the flight, I knew I was toast, and 24 hours later I was home and laid up in bed, aching with COVID. Maybe I was exposed to the virus earlier in the week, on the regrettable Guinness Storehouse tour (more below), but I’m pretty sure it was that seven-hour transatlantic flight—and the fact that I wasn’t wearing a damn mask.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, ready to reflect on all the fun I had in Ireland. We went because Erin needed continuing legal education credits and she had learned about Destination CLEs, a woman-owned company that organizes trips in fun locations. Naturally, I was happy to accompany Erin to a country I’d never before visited.
We went for 10 days: the first three it was just the two of us in the south of Ireland, then we were back to Dublin for a week, some with the CLE group and a lot on our own. We were there for the summer solstice, so the days were much longer than the nights and the weather was perfect (mostly sun, 60s, not much rain), and each was filled with something remarkable.
Where we slept
We took the direct Charlotte-to-Dublin red-eye flight, arrived early on a Wednesday morning, and immediately drove away from the city. We were exhausted, but fortunately our experience driving on the left side of the road on St. Croix prepared us for driving in Ireland. Erin started but lasted only an hour before she needed rest, so we pulled up at an oceanside park in Wicklow. Erin slept in the car while I wandered the Black Castle ruins, sat on rocky Travelahawk Beach, site of St. Patrick’s landing, and walked to Nick’s Coffee Company for a perfect croissant and cappuccino. Back in the car, heading south and west, we marveled at the lush fields, beautiful coastline, and quaint cottages. By mid afternoon, we’d arrived at Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, and after an hour in the steam room and a quick dip into the cold ocean, I would catch a short nap before dinner.
The next two nights we were in County Cork staying at Inchydoney Island Lodge & Spa, where nearly all the other lodgers were Irish; this is where the Irish have come for their family vacations for generations.
Once back in Dublin, we were at The Spencer Hotel on the River Liffey in Dublin’s financial district. There was a light rail stop nearby, the Dublin Connolly train station was just 10 minutes by foot, and the busy shopping and tourist areas were farther away but reachable. I walked miles each day.
Eating and drinking
We ate so well.
Exhausted as we were on that first long day, we’d saved energy to be able to enjoy the tasting menu at the Michelin-starred House Restaurant at the Cliff House Hotel. Every morsel was delicious: Annascaul black pudding (an Irish blood sausage) with beach rose and bitter cocoa crisp; lamb with navet (mashed turnip) and lovage-kombu glaze, smoked ricotta, and sweetbread (the lamb’s thymus); Mount Leinster cheese custard with braised maitake and garlic oil; and then there was the perfect combination of sourdough-and-treacle bread with salted butter from nearby Glenilen Farm.
After a visit to Kilkenny Castle, a quick but delicious dinner at Ristorante Rinuccini, another Michelin single star.
A couple of days later, we stopped into the Clonakilty Distillery for a whiskey tasting and I bought a bottle of the single pot still Irish whiskey. Erin asked the staff for a local’s recommendation for lunch, and we hustled over to Scannell’s Pub just before the kitchen closed to order the excellent seafood chowder and a pint of Murphy’s Irish Stout. Later, back in Dublin, I contemplated renting a car just so I could drive the four hours back to Clonakilty for that memorable chowder. Instead, I joined the CLE group for a morning tour and whiskey tasting at Teeling Distillery. That night, Erin and I were on our own, so we headed to the Phibsborough neighborhood for a rushed dinner at the Bald-Eagle pub and then we scurried over to Dalymount Park, home of Bohemian Football Club.
As soon as Erin had mentioned the possibility of traveling to Ireland, I had started looking for a soccer match to attend. The Bohs were the closest to our hotel, so they became my team. I marked my calendar for when tickets to the match would go on sale, and in early June I was poised at the keyboard and able to purchase two tickets to this night’s derby against Shamrock Rovers. Erin and I walked into the arena, found a place to stand among the other rowdy (and sometimes profane) supporters. In the first half, the Bohs scored twice and the crowd (attendance 4421) erupted in cheers and illegal flares. I was wearing a Bohemians jersey I’d ordered back in January, this the third kit sponsored by the band Fontaines D.C.. (This article from The Athletic, about the popularity of football shirts sporting band names, mentions the Fontaines kit; Bohemia now has a shirt with Oasis. I had tickets to see Fontaines D.C. in Cleveland in May, but I wasn’t able to travel that week so I gave the tickets to my brother-in-law, Michael.) I’m so glad we went to this match. Fun times.
When in County Cork, I drank Murphy’s Irish Stout on draft, then plenty of pints of Guinness in Dublin, including at the top of the Guinness Storehouse, a disneyesque visitor experience. The old vats and barrels were interesting, but otherwise this was multiple floors of disappointment and crowds of tourists. Another Guinness, more music, and good lamb stew at Doheny & Nesbitt Pub.
It took me a few days to figure out that while there are coffeeshops on nearly every block of every Irish town and city, few of them actually brew coffee. That is, they serve espresso; they’d offer me an Americano (espresso plus hot water), which I declined. I did get a good cup of “batch brew” at a place in Dublin, and the cortado at Off Grid Coffee in Howth was perfect.
Most mornings I drank tea. I joined the queue at Bread41 and was rewarded with a tasty cheese-and-onion tart and a sugary morning bun. Later that day, parched after a hike, I made my way to Rascals Brewing, ate most of a perfect pizza (Greece Witherspoon) with small glasses of Happy Days Session Pale Ale and a Mexican lager. Walking again, I was mesmerized by the water flowing over the canal lock across the street. This delighted me, so I meandered along Grand Canal to the next Luas tram stop at Goldenbridge.
My cousin Kristin Zuiker happened to be in Ireland at the same time. She and Josh, newly married, had their own busy itinerary so we didn’t connect. We’ll raise a pint to them up in D.C. later this year.
One of the many vacation surprises was the meal we had on our last night in the upstairs dining room of the Old Storehouse Bar & Restaurant in Dublin (Temple Bar area): fresh Irish salmon served with creamy root vegetable orzotto. Across the table from me was my beautiful wife. Out the window was the evening throng of tourists.
Music
From that salmon dinner, we walked to the ornate Gaiety Theatre to attend Riverdance 30: The New Generation. We’d never caught the show when it toured in Cleveland in the 1990s, so this was a breathtaking spectacle of dance and music, a wonderful way to end our vacation.
Earlier, in Clonakilty, a guy on guitar at Shanley’s Piano Bar, then over to De Barra’s Folk Club to catch the Galway indie rock band Telebox. In Dublin, my first pint of Guinness and a group of musicians at O’Donohues Pub. The CLE group bussed to Johnnie Fox’s Hooley Show, where one of the dancers pulled me up onto the stage to dance, though not well.
One day, on my own, after a hike, I navigated to an alley with auto detail shops and kitchen design contractors. Through an unmarked door I stepped into McNeela Musical Instruments to buy Oliver an inexpensive tin flute and a better Cygnet Irish rosewood flute. My hope is that Oliver will be with us on our return trip to Ireland and he’ll sit in on with the musicians at O’Donohues or the other pubs.
Getting around
What’s great about most of our vacations is the amount of walking we do. Like other trips, I packed running gear but didn’t once head out, or even down to the hotel gym. But we walked and hiked and moved.
In Ardmore, after that gourmet meal, we enjoyed a late-evening stroll on the Local Cliff Walk. Another day, a drive to the Castlefreke Trails and Long Strand beach near Clonakilty. From Dublin, the Paddy Wagon bus to Wicklow Mountains National Park, the rain making our short time there less than ideal, though St. Kevin’s round tower was pretty cool to see and touch. We strolled around the ruins of other castles and churches at Cashel Rock and Kilkenny. Took a train to Howth to walk the stunning cliffside trail, at times making me nervous because of the drop to the rocks and ocean and seabird colonies below. Another day, solo this time, a train to hike up to Bray Head.
When walking in town, I browsed bookstores: in Kilkenny I bought Dubliners by James Joyce and discovered Twist, the new novel by Colum McCann (my favorite writer), and in Dublin’s Hodges Figgis Booksellers I bought McCann’s first book of short stories and M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me.
I walked many miles through Dublin, one day carrying a bag of dirty laundry to leave at The American Laundrette; the next day, I returned for the washed, dried, and folded clothes.
My body is remembering a soreness after walking through museums, my brain filled with history and sadness and industry and hope: EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin, and Titanic Belfast, were phenomenal.
On the train to Belfast, we listened to four Irish men at a table, talking and laughing the entire ride, gifting us their joyous camaraderie. Soon, though, Erin and I were sitting in the back of a black taxi (Cab Tours Belfast) with Danny our driver guiding us through parts of Belfast still divided by walls and gates and filled murals to each side’s heroes and martyrs. It’s easy to divide people, said Danny, and it’s harder to bring them to the table to laugh and love. (This week, in the U.S., division gets stronger; one of my brothers wants more I.C.E. raids, and he could very well end up working for this growing secret police.)
Light speed
On that flight home, amid the sneezes and coughs, I read Twist. I seemed to be the only passenger using the reading light in the dimmed cabin; most others were watching movies on the individual seat screens. Twist is about an Irishman who leads a crew repairing damaged fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the sea. The story is narrated by another Irishman (and McCann was born in Dublin and lives in the U.S. now).
It was fascinating to think than an email or a photograph or a film could travel at near the speed of light in the watery darkness, and that the tubes sometimes had to be fixed, but my sense of the technology was limited, and it was all still a perplexing series of ones an zeros for me.
McCann has spun another great yarn. It was a thrilling read that I enjoyed on the plane, the train to Belfast, and across Dublin as I paused for coffee and few pages then later on a seat outside a pub as hundreds of tourists walked by.
When Malia was in Europe last fall, she visited a facility in the Canary Islands where one of the transatlantic cables comes up; on St. Croix, there’s a landing station not far from where we stay on the West End.
Again, narrator Fennell via McCann:
It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass. In glass made from sand. In sand that has sifted through time.
You’re reading the Zuiker Chronicles because of that.
A return to El Mozote
by Anton Zuiker on May 26, 2025
The Truth of El Mozote, in the New Yorker (Dec. 6, 1993)
Throughout its centennial year, the New Yorker is inviting its contributors to revisit notable works from its archive. They didn’t ask me, but I’m offering my take anyway, on the long feature that made up nearly the entire Dec. 6, 1993 issue.
In December 1993, I was a year-and-a-half out of college and living with my father and a brother in Honolulu. I was working two jobs, joining a djembe drum circle under a banyan tree one night a week, surfing on the weekends, and running on my lunch breaks. I was active, overstimulated, exhausted, and lonely—the love of my life was still in college (and studying in Austria for the semester), and I still had hopes of being an accomplished magazine journalist, a Peace Corps Volunteer, a globetrotting pacifist.
One day after my shift as a corporate writer, I walked to nearby Ala Moana Mall and into the Honolulu Book Shop, where I browsed the shelves of magazines. There was the new issue of the New Yorker, with its colorful cover art (In the Field, by Owen Smith) showing Death stalking campesinos in a field of maize, the wrapper blaring “The Massacre at El Mozote.” That’s all the editors were promoting for this issue, which was devoted entirely to the single long feature report, by Mark Danner, about a 1981 massacre at a mountain village in El Salvador.
At John Carroll University, the Jesuit university outside of Cleveland, I had studied liberation theology and narrative nonfiction, learned about the martyrdom of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Cleveland’s own Dorothy Kazel, and read dense, intense novels in a class called Latin American Dictators in Literature. This investigation about El Mozote, naturally, was something I had to read. I purchased the magazine and walked home.
Danner’s report opens as a team of specialists, arriving in El Mozote 11 years after the massacre, carefully excavate the ruined church and its skeletons. “By the next afternoon, the workers had uncovered twenty-five of them, and all but two were the skulls of children.” The murders of the children, and the men and women, too, will be described in horrific detail later. Across 80 pages of the magazine, Danner gives a clear and compelling recounting of the killings, as well as focus on the Salvadoran military personalities and the U.S. political pressures that mixed in this small nation and allowed such an atrocity to occur.
By early 1992, when a peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas was finally signed, Americans had spent more than four billion dollars funding a civil war that had lasted twelve years and left seventy-five thousand Salvadorans dead.
I read The Truth of El Mozote in its entirety that December. Danner’s reporting enlightened me. It saddened me. It inspired me anew to a life of writing and justice. It also hooked me on the New Yorker, and I have read most of the issues of the magazine over the last 30 years, sitting in coffee shops, standing in commuter trains, and swinging in hammocks (I paid the international subscription rate to get the magazine at my Peace Corps village in the South Pacific).
I’ve always remembered the tragedy in that first purchase, which I still have. I found it in a box of saved magazines and I reread it over the last few days, taking notes.
The killings of hundreds of men, women, and children at El Mozote during the El Salvador civil war in 1981, wrote Danner, “represented the climax of the era of the great massacres.”
That’s a line that comes toward the end of the report, and for a moment, sitting on the patio in front of a fire, a gentle rain falling on this Memorial Day, I naively read that as a larger hope for humanity. But I realized that the Rwandan genocide would unfold five months later, then the Srebrenica massacre (July 1995), 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, later the Mariupol theatre airstrike (2022), the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s subsequent scorched-earth response in Gaza (2023-2025). Sadly, war and terror and massacres continue.
It was not the last of them—most notably, in August of 1982 the Atlacatl, in an operation similar to that in El Mozote, killed some two hundred people at El Calabozo, in the Department of San Vincente—but after El Mozote the Army relied less and less on search-and-destroy operations that entailed large-scale killings of civilians.
El Salvador survived, and peace prevailed. Sadly, that nation has returned to the pages of the New Yorker as the current administration begins to send money and deportees to a prison there.
Another bite at Feedland
by Anton Zuiker on May 22, 2025
On Micro.blog, I noted that I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running. This is a longer post to explain the why and how of the accomplishment.
As I’ve detailed numerous times over the last 25 years, I read what Dave Winer writes every single day, and even though I’m in a long-term relationship with Textpattern, I try as many of Dave’s writing and publishing tools as possible.
Each solution of Dave’s seems to evolve into his next project, and it’s been fascinating to see the threads woven through his decades of innovation—I had no idea until this week’s post that he had created his first static site generator, called Autoweb, in 1995. As Dave ‘keeps diggin’ I try to keep up, and I try to remember to gather the results. I recently created a one-page archive of the posts I published with my self-hosted installation of the now-defunct 1999 blogging program. After 1999, Dave developed Drummer, and I’m still using that (albeit less frequently) to blog at Yumi Stap Storian.
Currently, Dave is developing WordLand, an interface for writing and publishing to WordPress. I haven’t tested this yet.
In March, Dave forecasted the end of Feedland (at both feedland.org and feedland.com). Feedland is a “web service for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users.” Like its precursors (River5, River4, River3), Feedland has been a valuable way for me to subscribe to newsfeeds and share the ‘river of news’ that brings me new information and insights every day. In Feedland, the presentation of these rivers is called a “news product.” I’ve had one of these dedicated to feeds from across Duke University (where I work) at dukeriver.news.
There are a lot of good feedreader apps and services available today, but I like the challenge of running my own tools. (I don’t do crosswords or Spelling Bee or Wordle to keep my neurons elastic.) There’s a way to self-host Feedland, detailed here. I first tested that in January 2023 but stepped back to use the hosted version. Now that that’s going away, I’m happy to say I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running now on a server with my web host, OpalStack. This took a couple of nights of fumbling with the terminal, remembering how to set a PATH and get Forever to run, learning how to tell the OpalStack server to use version 20 of node.js, and closely reading the Feedland server install setup instructions.
One small delineation for me on the “Create your database” step: In OpalStack, I created a database through the control panel and then logged into this new database with OpalStack’s web-based database administration tool called Adminer, then pasted the setup.sql commands. First time, no good; second time, I realized I had to take out the first command to create the database (duh, I was already in the database).
Success! I now had my own install of Feedland. I imported the feeds I’d saved out of Feedland.org and I was immediately able to pick up reading where I left off.
The next night, I tried to tackle the extra features, which will give a user (me!) a way to have a linkblog, not unlike the Radio linkblogs I used to run using Dave’s software. (I archived my Radio3 linkblog and Radio2 linkblog.) This step in the Feedland configuration relies on the Amazon AWS S3 service. A long time ago, I used S3 for another of Dave’s tools (World Outline, I think), but I’ve since lost whatever small bit of competence I had with AWS. After a night of bumbling about, I decided to cut my losses and pause on these features.
So that left one last important part of Feedland—the news products.
In the config file, I set flNewsProducts to true, and after some testing of the menu link to “My news product…”, I determined that in the config file urlNewsProducts needed to be set to “https://feed.stor.im/newsproduct?username=” and now the link from within Feedland sends me to my news product. I did the same for a new dukeriver account, and then I updated PagePark (another Dave software!) to feed these news products using the urlSiteContents config settings in news.mistersugar.com and dukeriver.news.
So, a second layer of success. I now run my own installation of Feedland and I can continue to offer the Duke River of News (alas, I’m not sure anyone uses it, but I try).