2026-08-13 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
OK, so I need to retract something from the previous Roden sent just a couple weeks back. The weather in Japan, in AUGUST, has been … SOMEWHAT SANE? A series of typhoons — some glancing off Japan, others smacking it — has dropped the humidity, made temperatures livable, and cooled the evenings. Well, at least for a few days. We’ll see what torment next week brings. But: just making note of this miraculous Summer Weather Development. (Meanwhile, Europe broils.)
2026-08-12 08:00:00
The strangest thing I’ve done with an LLM lately is genealogical. I’m adopted. A couple years ago I connected with my birth family. Using details they’ve provided and genetic testing, aided by a swarm of blood robots, I’ve unearthed huge swaths of my history. Ancestry.com hosts extensive databases of: draft cards, Ellis Island arrival documents, marriage and death and birth records, newspaper archives. The monthly fee is hefty, and I’ve never paid for access before because the thought of digging through databases makes me wilt. But Claude could dig, couldn’t it?
2026-08-04 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
There is sweat and then there is s-w-e-a-t and the out-of-doorsness in Japan is presently a natural machine that produces nothing but sweat and sweat and sweat and swelter. Dryness has been eradicated. Fire is impossible to start. Blowtorch any single thing and it will laugh in your face. The implicit ubiquity of moistness inspired Japanese dictionary publishers to excise “dry.” A useless word. The only sane response is to find a cool cave at the top of a mountain and hibernate until November. (Or go to Victoria, Canada, which I did; more on that below.)
2026-07-12 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
Man, it was fun talking with Kazunori Hamana back in January. He’s lived a bizarre life, seemingly one without a roadmap, though I suspect his laid-back, subtly-goatee’d vibes belie a cunning streak. He was welcoming and rough-edged in a disarming way. He lives out in the wilds of Chiba, in an area that feels like it may cease to exist without his presence in ten or fifteen years. Many lives ago, he lived in the wilds of Shibuya, running a select / used-clothing shop called “Blues” out of Ura-Harajuku (back when Ura-Hara was a place you’d catch whispers of on rogue Usenet forums, or in copies of TOKION snatched from Casa Magazines in the West Village, if anywhere; today it is splayed about TikTok like a glazed ham at Old Country Buffet) and driving around in a Ferrari. Now he drives a kei-truck and spends all the money he makes selling his incredible pottery on buying land and old homes on the Chiba coast, setting up artist residencies, creating space for artist communities to take root.
2026-06-30 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
Go Knicks! Or something like that. What a time to be in NYC. (So everyone tells me.) I watched the last game in the courtyard at a Jane Jacobs–designed co-op in the West Village surrounded by kids and crunchy adults and then wandered in a collective stupor through the streets of New York until about two in the morning bearing witness to decades of repressed joy. A few nights later, Matt Rodbard and I were having dinner in Fort Greene and in walked Spike Lee, looking as happy as any a man could look.
2026-06-18 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
Alex Wolfe walks. He walks weird walks and I like weird walks, so when Alex reached out to do a little walk (not a weird one, really, just a little one with a sprinkle of weird), I — of course — said: Sure.
His pitch: “A short walk through privately owned public spaces I mapped through Midtown.” Sounded good to me. Midtown, a word that evokes little more than Sbarro, tourists, Tiffany’s, bad suits, cement, cement, MoMA, cement, and glass walls rising from the pavement. I was up for a revision of my internal mapping.