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.
2026-04-14 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
We were lucky. Maybe the luckiest group walking the Portuguese coastal Camino. (Certainly the second luckiest.) All the things conspired in our favor: The weather, the food, the quality of the path (lots of great seaside boardwalk walking for miles and miles), the kind old café owners who suffered our group’s order-chaos with inspired equanimity.
A Walk and Talk was afoot. Kevin and I have run a bunch of these things now. We’ve walked:
2026-03-24 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
I love Nagasaki. The more I visit, the more I love it. It’s a city with a historical and cultural depth and complexity you don’t find in most big cities, let alone mid-sized cities. It rewards multiple explorations, and I look forward to exploring more of the city and prefecture at large in future trips.
If you’ve never been to Nagasaki, you should go. And if you haven’t been in a while, you should head back!
2026-03-21 08:00:00
Roden Readers —
Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. Author of TBOT (amzn | bkshp). Poking my head out into newsletter land. This? Roden, a newsletter you signed up for at some point. Perhaps last week, perhaps fourteen years ago, when I started shooting these out.
I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing something that I’m bad at and am trying to get better at: I’ve been having fun (and trying not to be crushed by the guilt of having fun). I went to LA and then Santa Fe and then Hokkaido with the binding agent of: eating great food with people I love. In Santa Fe I spent a few days meditating at Mountain Cloud Zen Center (more on that below; also, yes, fly from Japan to Santa Fe for Zen; also also, turns out the headquarters of their school is around the corner from my home ha ha ha). My body loves Santa Fe. Loves the crispness of the air. The elevation (once it gets used to it). The sharp light. The salsa. I spent a few mornings writing in Collected Works and generally came away from the whole visit thinking: I’d like to head back, eat More Salsa, spend more time in that corner of the US. In LA, I went deep on LLMs and Claws and all that with Kevin Rose (and also met some Hollywood-adjacent folks about book optioning), eating lots of Doordash’d Gwyneth Paltrow slop bowls and making software. I have to say, these three weeks of doofery have been some of the most fun weeks I’ve had in years. So, thanks for indulging me a bit of newsletter silence as I pretended to be a human out in the wild.