Five Favorite Parts With Karim Callender

📷 Photo via Keith Denley

The 2025 Q.S.S.O.T.Y‘s Five Favorite Parts was a bit of a journalistic “My War.”

Not because he didn’t want to do it — he was really hyped to do one — but because he began getting in his head about what to include. Too many parts! Too much stuff he loved. (Speaking from experience, an abundance of beloved parts is better than the opposite experience: getting on a call with someone and it’s, “Umm… uhhh… what was that Jake Johnson part where he skated the thing again?”)

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Brand Narratives: Or How Skateboard Companies Rise & Fall & Rise Again

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Art by Francesco Pini

Stereo Skateboards emerged in the early 90s as a jazzy, loose-trucked alternative to what had come before. Its first video, A Visual Sound, is a classic, but by the end of the decade the brand was showing its age. “All anybody wanted was stairs and cartoons,” says Stereo co-founder Chris “Dune” Pastras, speaking on the phone. His partner at Stereo, Jason Lee, had already departed to pursue an acting career, and the brand’s distributor, Deluxe Distribution, Pastras says, had other companies that were blowing up. “Maybe it was a sign of the times.”

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How Skateboarders Won & Got A Skate Plaza At Philadelphia’s Muni Building — An Interview With Pat Heid

📷 Photos by Chris Mulhern, Zander Taketomo & Pat Heid

For some skaters, the sight of a sanctioned skate plaza at the Philadelphia Municipal Services building — one made out of Love Park, City Hall and old Muni materials — is surreal. For Pat Heid and his crew, it is a victory produced by years of advocacy, meetings, dead-ends, close-calls, and divine timing.

Philly’s new plaza opens on April 17, and here is the story of how it became a reality.

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Hard Reset — An Interview with Quasi’s New Am, Cooper Qua

📝 Intro + Interview by Greg Navarro
📷 Photography by Greg Navarro, Thomas Goldman & Cooper Qua

Cooper Qua is from Albany, New York and is the youngest team rider on Quasi Skateboards. His debut video part for the company is in their latest video, Hard Reset. I sat down with Cooper at Tompkins to chat about the future of Quasi and to hear about his dream of becoming a pro skateboarder as a teenager from Upstate New York.

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