The latest edition of VICE’s Culture Club escapes the doomscroll this week and heads straight into the woods, as host Jackson Garrett sits down with Boone Hogue and Logan Juggler—the duo behind Official Stick Reviews. Their Instagram account has become the wholesome core of “Stick Nation,” a global community built around finding, rating, and celebrating sticks. It sounds ridiculous. That’s exactly why millions of followers, celebrities, and even NBC late-night host Jimmy Fallon can’t get enough of it.
Garrett opens with the question that fuels most comment wars: what actually counts as a stick? Boone calls it “a real controversial subject,” but years of “professional stickology,” their tongue-in-cheek name for the study of sticks, have given them an answer. “It’s the aura of the stick. It’s the magic,” he says. “If it elicits joy or imagination or some sort of magic, we consider that a stick.” That rule once led to their most debated post—an icicle from Antarctica that the community eventually crowned an “ice-powered magic enchanted stick.”
From there, the categories run deep: driftwood sticks, heirloom sticks passed down for decades, enchanted fire and ice sticks, and the ever-controversial “mod sticks” that have been carved or altered. “That’s a carved stick, that should be on a different page,” Boone says, laughing. For a community built on wholesomeness, mod-stick arguments are as heated as it gets.
What started as a camping-trip joke in Moab, Utah, has inadvertently become the world’s largest stick archive. The pair receives “at least a hundred a day” through Instagram, TikTok, and email—and they save them all. “We have about a terabyte of sticks archived at the moment,” Boone says. “We consider ourselves the number one stick experts in the world, but also the number one stick archivists.” They’ve logged submissions from all seven continents and more than 120 countries, from Iraq to Antarctica. The final frontier? “We just want to get one from a space station,” Logan says.
For all the data, sticks are still about feeling. “It puts everyone on the same playing field,” Logan says. “Old people and young people…everyone kind of goes back to being a kid.” Boone adds that it’s proof people everywhere can “connect over something as simple as a stick.”
The lore around Stick Nation is already rich. There’s The Stickler, a man from Washington who messaged them a video of himself blowing into a hollowed “horn of Gondor” and challenging the internet to beat him. There’s Boone’s 95-year-old grandpa, who joined Instagram just to follow the account and sent in the staff he’s had for 30 years. And there are celebrity fans who show up unprompted: Dermot Mulroney, Fred again.., Olivia Wilde, Rainn Wilson, and Jimmy Fallon, among them. “We usually don’t reach out,” Logan says. “They kind of just appear in our inbox, and we’re like, oh wow.”
Now, the project is moving offline. Logan and Boone just released a book, Sticks, with Ten Speed Press as a “physical representation of the wholesomeness and positivity” of the page. They recently hosted their first in-person stick tournament in Brooklyn with TikTok’s Anthony Poe—more than 100 people showed up with their prized finds—and with plans for a 12-city tour slated in 2026.
To hear how two guys turned childhood imagination into a global archive—and why the next great stick might come from space—listen to the full VICE Culture Club episode with Official Stick Reviews.
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