2026-06-09 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
I walk fast, he said and he did, he did walk fast, as fast as I walk when I’m walking one of my big walks carrying a giant pack and trying to knock out forty kilometers before sunset. But we were not knocking out forty kilometers before sunset, we were leaving shoe leather all over the Met, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that place where everyone gathers “in the name of charity” once a year like it’s the Hunger Games. That Met. The Met with the line to get in not because it’s popular (though it is that) but because America loves guns. America loves guns so much that they (society at large?) think people are going to bring them to the Met (or the MoMA or the NYPL or a Broadway show or pretty much any other space that has more than a hundred people in it) and so you have to open your tote as a dispassionate guard barely glances into the darkness. A glance that — were I a betting man — I’d bet misses ten-out-of-ten guns people are trying to smuggle in.
2026-06-01 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
Thanks for all the “Yo!“s last week. It looks like transmissions from mailbot2k are getting through. (Let me know if you see any “rendering errors” in your email clients; I think we fixed the Proton Mail issues.) FYI, because the last issue of Roden ended up in many a spam folder, let me also announce here a reading I’m doing next week:
Hope to see you there!
2026-05-26 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
Hey there! This is Craig Mod broadcasting Ridgeline from my new home-cooked newsletter software, mailbot2000. An issue of Roden came out last week and was sent via mb2k, if you’re subbed to Roden and didn’t get it, please let me know / check your spam. If you are getting this and didn’t “Yo” me for Roden, please reply with a little “Yo!” to let me know this is arriving (it also signals to Gmail that this isn’t spam). OK, onward!
2026-05-22 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
Action items:
I saw a baby jaywalking. I saw the most pregnant woman in the world jaywalking. I saw two kids jaywalking on their hands, a man jaywalking with a chair on his head. I saw cops jaywalking. I saw people on every mode of transport jayriding in every possible direction; a guy on a one wheel breaking a land speed record, a scooter, a bike, a double bike, a unicycle, a silver stallion. Where was Casey Neistat? I didn’t see him. But I saw a man jaywalk with his buttocks very out, wearing only angel wings and a golden cup on his nuts. I saw a nun jaywalking while smoking a joint. Weed was everywhere. People smoked cigarettes with joyful impunity, butts flicked hither and thither because The Floor is the Garbage. All the toilets are mostly broken. A middle-aged white woman two seats down from me used the word “fuck” more in a minute than I’ve used in a lifetime. Another middle-aged white woman broke into tears at the sight of Colin Jost, fanning herself saying omg omg omg like she was fourteen and the Paul McCartney had just appeared (he’d appear next week). I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits. I saw the bald villain from A Princess Bride. He’s a tiny one! I watched him monologue in a small theater on the edge of (in the?) West Village for two hours and only “rested my eyes” a couple of times despite being jet-lagged out of my mind.
2026-05-02 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
Hello from Crazy Weather Town. Is it spring? Some days it feels like it might be, for a few milliseconds. And then other days, no. No spring for you. The floor heating was on this morning and that felt good. Soon enough the sauna will be on over the entirety of the country. Tonight, 100 kilometer per hour winds. Also, Monday morning, more 100 km/hr winds combined with rain.
2026-04-23 08:00:00
The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen.
iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system. PushPopPress began to illuminate this path fifteen years ago, and then they got slurped up — like so many other promising, young, talented designers and companies around that time — by Facebook, only to disappear into the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s electric hydrofoil surfboard. Using an iPad should feel like a finger ballet. Your hands should be swooping and swiping and the whole OS should feel like skipping across a taut slackline, a bit bouncy and pleasing and physical but also precise and quick and focused taking you where you need to go, across some creative gulf. There should be no “hard edges” anywhere. iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy. When you pick up one of those magic slabs (and truly, the amount of engineering and power in those thin-as-heck slabs is something else) you should feel giddy, like you’re about to enter a whole ’nother computer-ing universe, one that is all about elegant multitouch tactility, worlds apart from your phone or your laptop.