https://craigmod.com/essays
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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…
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…
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…
Ridgeline subscribers — Just a reminder: Doing a TBOT event at Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC tomorrow night (Wed the 10th of June, 2026). Hope to see you there if you’re local! And now, on to Ridgeline: 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…
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: Wednesday, June 10, 2026, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC (RSVP at that link!) Hope to see you there!
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!
Roden Readers — Action items: Doing a book event / reading in Asheville, NC on June 10 — RSVP here! Thinking of a small reprint of TBOT Fine Art — sign up here to be notified This is being sent using my new home cooked newsletter software; if you get this, please reply and say “yo!” as a signal that delivery is happening #Hello NY 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…
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.
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…
Ridgeline subscribers — We were lucky. Maybe the luckiest group walking the Portuguese costal 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:
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!
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...
