Essays and updates from craigmod.com
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
I’m software bonkers: I can’t stop thinking about software. And I can’t stop building software. I’ve always been opinionated about how software should work. Mainly, it should be fast . The bounds of it should be “knowable.” The contract you have with it should be “sane” (i.e., you just own it). But I’m busy, and I’m an OK-but-not-great coder. So all of these software opinions largely…
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from Toyohashi, a city between nowhere and somewhere else. A Tōkaidō city I’ve walked through on my two trips back and forth between Kyoto and Tokyo. A city with a space shuttle on top of a building and the letters USA strangely emblazoned below. On both of my Tōkaidō walks, one particular bit of Toyohashi has stood out to me and has intrigued me in ways few other…
Ridgeline subscribers — I like the blue skies of early January Kanto Japan. It’s usually warm, certainly in the sun. Looking out at that winter ocean heals a feral heart. Starting the year off with a mega walk is never a bad idea. Muscles, ya got ‘em. Legs, they work. So, that’s how this year started. Trained to Misaki-guchi — a cute little town on the tip of the Miura Peninsula. Then from there:…
Roden Readers — Hello from the backside of some Tokyo snow. It was purty. I miss snow. Maybe not as much snow as New York’s been gettin’, but still — I wish we had a good five or six snow days in Tokyo each year. As is, we’re lucky to get one, and then it’s all gone in twenty-four hours. I still remember a Valentine’s Day night some thirteen years or so ago — a mega blizzard hit Tokyo. I popped…
Hello there. I’m Craig Mod . And we just entered Year Eight of my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program. Time passes, things get done. Here we are with seven giant years under our belt. Seven of the biggest years of my life, by far. Much of it thanks to this membership program. Truly, I wouldn’t have done a fraction of what I’ve done without the support (financial and spiritual) of members.…
Ridgeline subscribers — I like “eras.” That is, named chunks of time. Japanese history tends to periodicize based on locus of power. The Tokugawa Shogunate reigned for hundreds of years, and so: Edo, where the power was, becomes the period (a big sweeping one). Post-Shogunate, power was restored to the emperor, and so we get: Meiji (1868–1912), Taishō (1912–1926), Shōwa (1926–1989), Heisei…
Ridgeline subscribers — Nagasaki pivots around its harbor, into which flows the Uragami River. Mountains covered in small homes and shops rise alongside; at night, the whole valley sparkles like a jewel. An easy ropeway ride up Inasayama lets you take it all in. In the afternoon, the city bustles with locals. It’s because of these reasons and many more, that I selected Nagasaki for my 2026 New…
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from Denny’s. Happy new year. You can tell it’s January first, because I’m at Denny’s . I woke up and made a nice coffee and did some accounting (as one does) and went to my local shrine in Tokyo and bowbowclapclapbow’d and then I was off! Tramping across a city bathed in that classic January first crystalline sunlight. I can’t remember the last time it wasn’t like…
Roden Readers — Hi there from Sweatpantsland, population: me. Merry Christmas! I almost forgot it was Christmas. This is emblematic of my recent days, and maybe even my recent years — a disembodiedness in which, if not reminded, I seem to fall out from the flow of time. It’s foggy and kinda weirdly warm here in Japan today; the Christmas surfers are out, bobbing in the water, Mt. Fuji is somewhere…
Ridgeline subscribers — I’ll die on my dumb hill, the one where I say: the best time to visit and walk (most) of Japan is the end of November and the start of December. I think a lot of folks have a kind of North-Eastern-American mentality, where by the time December hits New York City, snow is falling and there’s a too-sharp bite to the air. Not so in Tokyo, or anywhere else west and south of the…
Ridgeline subscribers — (Originally published in Japanese in Esquire Japan, October 2025) Some twenty-three years ago in Tokyo, I used to eat at a funny little tendon shop called Imoya . I was a student at Waseda University back then, and this place was a campus staple. Tendon, when done well, can be divine, and Imoya was divine through and through. The shop was run by the crankiest husband and…
Roden Readers — Ahh, it’s nice. The outside. The outside is nice. Finally, very nice. The best season in Japan. The leaves, they change. Out yonder, Mt. Fuji performs foojalicousness on the horizon as I type these very words. Being a bit coy, hiding, peeking, hiding once again. The usual Fooj, all snow capped and sweet. ’Tis the season to Buy Things, apparently. So says every website in the world.…
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from the other side of my ~220 kilometer walk through the Kiso Valley . I sent a shorter version of this newsletter as the last issue of the (the entire walk is) Between Two Mountains pop-up newsletter. This version is quite expanded. The archives of the B2M pop-up are available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members on the members’ site . And if you’d like to follow along in my…
Ridgeline subscribers — It’s time for another walk. A walk down a valley — a valley I’ve walked many times before (not a metaphor!), but one I love and so one very much worth: A rewalk. A double rewalk, even. I’m heading out to walk 100 kilometers south-north along the Kiso-ji in Nagano, and then turning around and walking 100 kilometers back, north-south along the same route. Of course, I’m…
Ridgeline subscribers — In a bizarre confluence of Japan-based media coincidence, I’m on the cover of Papersky’s latest issue (where I walk around Yamaguchi with their team) and also have an article / portrait (alongside Cate Blanchett, natch) in UNIQLO ’s latest LifeWear Magazine . LifeWear is available for free at all UNIQLO stores worldwide. Every issue is bilingual, and they localize the…
Ridgeline subscribers — About a year since I last visited — and now nine months since Toyama, my pick , was selected as one of the New York Times’ “52 Places to Visit” in 2025 — I returned to Blue Train . Blue Train opened in 1980, about the same time I opened. The owners are even older than you might think (they pleaded with me not to tell you their precise ages), the shop having been opened…
Roden Readers — Ahoy from Crisptown, population: Everyone in Japan. The summer is done. Thank glorious gods be, the summer is done. (Mostly.) I can feel my brain starting to solidify again, returning to its natural state after three months of relentless broiled liquefaction. In honor of sane mercury and humidity readings, I’m heading off on a 200-kilometer walk and running a pop-up newsletter:…
Ridgeline subscribers — A few nights ago, on a lark, Sam Holden — public bath and Onomichi specialist, urbanist and translator — and I, amidst a post-dinner stroll through Tokyo, decided to “walk through Shibuya.” I try with all my might to avoid Shibuya as one might avoid french-kissing a running blender (or scraping a kidney stone along one’s ureter). At best, I’ll skirt the edges, but…
Ridgeline subscribers — The first and only memory I have of a teacher of mine performing something resembling a stand-up routine was in eleventh grade. My AP bio teacher, Mr. Abelon, came back from a few sick days and explained, in graphic detail, what his recent passing of a kidney stone had been like. I had never heard of such a thing, this so-called “kidney stone.” Maybe it’s because I have a…
Ridgeline subscribers — Some six and a half years ago I wrote the first Ridgeline sitting on the second floor of my Kamakura studio. I had been living there for two years by then, and the place had already subtly and not so subtly changed my life in so many ways, that I get a bit woozy just thinking about it. I moved down here (a quick, single, forty-five-minute train ride south) eight and a half…
Roden Readers — Hello from the swelterdome, the Cape O‘ Temperature Oppression, a.k.a. the Kanto area of Japan in July / August. It is so spectacularly, consistently hot that it’s hard to overstate just how bananas this heat is, how all consumingly present and manic it feels. Can’t outrun it, this Japan heat. “Outside” doesn’t exist from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and even then, you’re swimming…
Ridgeline subscribers — I’m Craig Mod and I’ve been buuuuuuurnt out this last month following my epic Things Become Other Things mega book tour . Finally, I’m gingerly emerging from my recovery cave. (But reserve the right to retreat again.) Here’s a fresh dispatch — in praise of small businesses and why overtourism can be anathema to them. A great city is typified by…
Roden Readers — What a tour. My god. It’s going to take me a while to fully process the last six weeks. But the tldr is: What a tour, what a wonderful tour. Better than I could have imagined, far exceeding all expectations. Thank you to everyone who showed up. Did you come to an event and take pictures? If so, please drop them in this folder . Thanks. I did a terrible job documenting things and am…