Craig Mod's essays and updates on writing, photography, walking, books, and publishing.
Roden Readers — Hello from Europe. My body hasn’t been this happy in September in years. The coolness. The chill. The clouds. The 0 UV index. What is this crazy way of summer living? Where you’re not being blasted by a death ray from above while wrapped in a w…
Ridgeline subscribers — For the last ten days I’ve been walking around London. Mostly in a little corner of it in the northeast part of the city. But can you even call a part a “corner” when the city extends in every direction without stopping? Whatever you ca…
Ridgeline subscribers — Hi, I’m Craig Mod and this is Ridgeline, a newsletter about walking — mostly in Japan, but this time in NYC. Elsewhere: The Things Become Other Things fine art reprint is now in stock. And I’ve been using Claude to do weird blood sleuth…
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,…
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.…
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…
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…
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 colle…
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 thro…
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…
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 i…
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 /…
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, ple…
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 ove…
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 s…
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 walki…
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 t…
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…
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…
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 e…
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, th…
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 al…
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 memb…
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)…
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 i…
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…
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 flo…
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 D…
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 campu…
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,…