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.
2026-06-09 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers —
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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that place where everyone gathers “in the name of charity” once a year like it’s the Hunger Games. That Met. The Met with the line to get in not because it’s popular (though it is that) but because America loves guns. America loves guns so much that they (society at large?) think people are going to bring them to the Met (or the MoMA or the NYPL or a Broadway show or pretty much any other space that has more than a hundred people in it) and so you have to open your tote as a dispassionate guard barely glances into the darkness. A glance that — were I a betting man — I’d bet misses ten-out-of-ten guns people are trying to smuggle in.
2026-06-01 08:00:00
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:
Hope to see you there!
2026-05-26 08:00:00
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!
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.