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The first stick was small, and shaped like a revolver.
It was late summer 2023 and two friends, Boone Hogg and Logan Jugler, both 31, were on a late summer hike heading towards Delicate Arch, a 16m red rock formation in Utah’s Arches national park, when Jugler spotted it on the ground. He picked it up and began rating its attributes – colour, shape, flexibility – out of 10, while Hogg filmed. Then they uploaded it to Instagram.
That autumn, they found more sticks, and posted those, too. Word spread (in that strange algorithmical way) and soon, all over the world, people began sending photos and videos of their own sticks for review. By that Christmas @officialstickreviews (OSR) – “the internet’s go-to for stick reviews” – had 14k followers. Within a year, it had grown to 3m.
There was no grand plan, Hogg tells me: “We just found the stick funny, but also knew, between us, what made it a good stick.” Arches national park is known for its pinyon pines and junipers, but the stick’s provenance wasn’t the point. Like interpreting clouds, it tapped into something elemental, the joy of conjuring another world out of the everyday. “It’s that universal human experience you have as a kid, when you find a stick and it just becomes something else,” says Jugler. “And the idea that you can find magic anywhere,” says Hogg.
The videos are short and simple, but strangely captivating, almost beautiful. Usually filmed in situ, one clip shows a tourist high in the Atlas mountains discussing the merits of his stick in broken English with a local Amazigh man. At the end, they hug. Most sticks on the feed resemble a tool, weapon, snake or staff, but occasionally one pops up that’s shaped like a hand or a letter. For me, the shape doesn’t matter; they’re more of a proxy. Watching them, I’m distracted by the person, and how they ended halfway up the Tian Shan mountain range in March. Because OSR is not about where the sticks are from, but the vicarious joy of where they can take you, which is the sort of thing you only get with a bit of free-rambling to camera.
Stick Nation, the collective noun for its fanbase, is now spread across 120 countries, including Taiwan, Indonesia and Iraq. The reviews always begin with: “What’s up, stick nation?” This phrase transcends language, much like Budweiser’s “Wassup” did in the early 00s. “We just liked making something that harnessed what was exciting about the internet in the beginning,” says Hogg. Some contributors are adults. Some are children. One is a young woman secretly filming herself on a date in some guy’s bedroom after she found a stick hanging from his ceiling.
Jugler says that what makes a good stick is indescribable, it’s just an “aura”. They try to avoid being too prescriptive, though they do defer to various fixed metrics, including size, grain and shape, and for a period they introduced more esoteric criteria, including the Tennison Curve Scale, named after one of their fans. Recently, someone sent them a video of a stick made of ice from Antarctica. “It was controversial, but seeing as there are no other sticks, we decided it qualified,” Jugler says. The best stick is awarded stick of the month. “I imagine we’ve seen more sticks than anyone else in the world and all I can say is that no two sticks are alike,” says Hogg.
I began following OSR before Christmas. Growing up in the countryside, I had long been desensitised to the joys of sticks: of sword-fighting with them, playing wizards or witches, or Pooh Sticks, and the ease with which you can overwrite a stick’s purpose every time you pick it up to play. Then I had a son, and then another, and now sticks are a central part of my day-to-day life, so much so that I keep a little umbrella stand on the doorstep for all the sticks accumulated throughout the day.
I check OSR most days because, frankly, I find it soothing. I spend a lot of time online, but I’ve always felt conflicted by most user-generated content – the narcissistic “get ready with me” videos and glossy trad-wife cooking content. Sometimes, it feels like a pure and unfiltered portrait of the modern world; a bit of fun. But often, I feel like it’s breaking my soul. From being with my sons, I’ve learned to really appreciate a stick’s wonder: you have to stop, look and focus. You have to get offline (and then later go and check out the other sticks online).
The early stick videos have a bro-like flavour: face to camera, generic “gym rock” soundtrack, the stick’s rating scrawled in a Brat-green Fetching font. But as time went on, the vibe mellowed. These days, it’s just people describing their sticks to camera in a punctilious manner. There are even celebrities on there: Lin-Manuel Miranda and his kids submitted a stick. The actor Olivia Wilde did, too, “Just her, no red carpet, walking out of the forest with a walking stick, super low-key.”
Like everything online, the account is reactive. “When the fires first started [in California], we had a father and a daughter send in a stick, and you could see the skies, this impending thing behind them.” Yet there they were, talking about a staff amid the chaos. Hogg and Jugler donate profits from the merchandise they sell to charity, but Hogg is keen to stress that “on stick nation, there is no politics – it’s just sticks”. Jugler agrees. “We don’t think about it too deeply as a role on social media,” he says. “We don’t want to push for American positivity.”
So far, they’ve received 100k submissions, meaning they probably have the largest stick archive in the world. “We get hundreds a day, and we save them all,” says Hogg. “It’s our duty to keep them.”
One afternoon in early January, as dusk began to settle on yet another day before schools went back, my family and I decided – as we often do – to go for a walk across Wanstead Flats, a 135-hectare (330-acre) piece of nearby grassland on the southernmost tip of Epping Forest. It’s mostly flat expanses, ponds and man-trodden paths through gorse, but it’s vast. Halfway through the walk, my son was getting cold and ratty. I suggested we circle back and look for a stick. Of course, there were hundreds; he grabbed one and started wielding it like a barbarian. We gave the baby one, too, and he just held on to it.
My son is a pitch-perfect imaginist at the best of times – but with a stick, he becomes a knight, an explorer, an Octonaut. My boyfriend found one and did his best Gandalf “You shall not pass!” bit, and so I grabbed one too. With the sticks, we were able to finish the walk turning a freezing trudge across familiar terrain into a voyage through time and space. This is the thing about sticks. Like a prop in theatre, they are a gateway not just to your imagination, but a time before anything really mattered.
“It’s that romantic view of the world,” says Jugler. “And they’re like, free.”
